They’re Sounding More Down-to-Earth : Burbank Airport commissioners and spouses no longer fly first-class to ‘classrooms’

In August, 1994, a Burbank City Council member protested the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority’s policy of liberal first-class air travel and other free perks for its commissioners’ spouses.

Even after the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office announced in May that it was reviewing allegations of possible misuse of funds by airport officials, a kind of let’s-nip-this-in-the-bud mentality hadn’t surfaced.

“I don’t think it’s a real problem,” a former Airport Authority member said in May. Added Airport Authority President Carl W. Raggio Jr.: “You, as a commissioner, have the obligation to be on top of every safety concern there is. The only way to get that is by going to classrooms. These [conferences] are our classrooms once a year.”

But folks weren’t necessarily bothered by commissioners attending a reasonable number of conferences each year, but perhaps by how cushy and costly it was to travel to and from those “classrooms.”

Since 1992, for example, Burbank Airport commissioners have spent more than $80,000 on travel that included first-class tickets for commissioners and their spouses. Some, however, upgraded to first class at their own expense.

Yet Times reporter Vivien Lou Chen reports that commissioners at John Wayne Airport in Orange County do not get paid for out-of-town trips and are reimbursed only for gas to drive to and from meetings. At Los Angeles International, Van Nuys, Palmdale and Ontario airports, officials fly coach for nearly all business-related trips, and spouses may not fly at public expense.

Well, one month short of a year later, we’re hearing much more reasonable utterances from the folks at Burbank Airport.

Late last month, Raggio said that he will put an immediate end to the 18-year-old policy of providing free first-class air travel to commissioners and their spouses. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for the times,” he said. “I just don’t think bodies such as ours ought to be put in the awkward position of playing defense all the time. The end result is we’re not getting to the business of the day.”

Said Burbank Airport Commissioner Philip E. Berlin: “If it’s a business trip, in my mind there’s no reason for a commissioner to travel first-class. There’s absolutely, absolutely, absolutely no reason for the authority to be paying for a spouse.”

We think that the officials of an airport that is the object of intense opposition on everything from noise to expansion plans ought to reach such common-sense decisions much more quickly. In such a hostile atmosphere, good public relations is paramount, and not even the appearance of excess and impropriety can be tolerated.