AFTER FAILURES, TIME TO DUMP AIRPORT GROUP.

Byline: Tom Paterson 

ANOTHER Burbank Airport ``summit'' concerning the 20-year running airport expansion controversy has come and gone, and the controversy rages on: Who's in control? How big? Is there a real noise problem? And how safe is safe?

Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena created the joint-powers authority in the 1970s to save the airport from threatened closure. The save-close controversy is long gone. The authority served its purpose. Since then, this joint-powers authority has generated 20 years of conflicts, controversies and lawsuits over future growth of a promised no-growth airport.

It's time to abolish the joint-powers authority and turn the operation of the airport over to Burbank. Certainly, a feasibility study is justified. Burbank's interests would be best served by investing legal dollars in a solution instead of continuing controversy.

A Burbank takeover should not be a financial risk or burden. Airport revenues are adequate to cover bond obligations and operate the airport without taxpayer subsidy.

It's time for Glendale and Pasadena to leave, voluntarily, by state legislative action or by legal action. They lose nothing by leaving. They have no financial equity investment and have contributed no money to airport operations.

Burbank doesn't want a mini-LAX, and Glendale and Pasadena apparently do because that's the kind of project they're pushing. Burbank is in the best position to decide how big is big, since the airport is located in the city and their infrastructure and environment bears the greatest burdens from airport operations.

Forget the Part 161 process and that build-now-talk-later scheme. The best way to secure growth controls is through a new environmental review and FAA funding process, by attaching growth-control conditions to the FAA funding application. Such a precedent was set in 1977 in the purchase of the airport from Lockheed.

The airport claims a 90 percent reduction in noise from airport operations over the past 20 years. Commercial jet flights have nearly tripled in 20 years. How could that increase in jet activity have reduced noise 90 percent?

An independent noise study commissioned by a Los Angeles community group, 3 miles down the main departure flight tracks, compared aircraft noise levels in the community in 1977 to the study period and found significant increase in noise impact.

Quite an inconsistency. The inconsistency favors the airport because they define noise impact based on state regulations that sanction computer modeling and a 24-hour averaging of noise events, a process set forth in state airport noise regulations.

You only have to relocate a few noise monitors and shift the flight patterns a few blocks to achieve computer-driven dramatic noise impact reductions. We call it ``beating the box.'' The boxes are the noise monitor boxes, located in the vicinity of the airport, that collect the computer data.

It's time for our state legislators to overhaul these deceptive state regulations so we can have a realistic airport environmental noise impact determination.

Is the continued operation of the terminal, because of its location, playing Russian roulette with the safety of the air traveling public? Is it time to shut down the terminal unit until the growth controversy is settled? What are the options to such extreme action?

Recent press comments, from both the airport director and authority president, raise serious questions about how safe is safe. We're getting conflicting signals judging from their recent actions, such as expanding the terminal and running an expensive ad campaign to lure passengers to the airport.

It's time to bring Congressmen Howard Berman, D-Mission Hills, and James Rogan, R-Pasadena, to the airport for another safety fact-finding hearing. We had one in 1979 that prevented the FAA from initiating head-to-head flights on the west runway during reconstruction of the north-south runway.

Not a hearing to decide how big is big, but to determine how safe is safe. What, if anything, needs to be done to assure a safe terminal operation until the growth controversy is settled, an acceptable terminal plan is approved and a new terminal is built? Even if the growth controversy was settled tomorrow, it will be years before we see a new terminal.

Maybe we won't have to close down the airport terminal until a new terminal is built. What are the options?