Cities Win Fight for 818 Code

In what local officials called “an amazing victory,” the state Public Utilities Commission Tuesday surprisingly voted to exempt Burbank, Glendale, La Crescenta and La Canada Flintridge from a new 626 telephone area code, allowing them to stay in the 818 area.

The PUC’s ruling means that 2.7 million phone numbers will stay in 818, while 1.4 million phones will shift into the new 626 code.

The code, which will begin operation next June, will start in Pasadena and encompass the San Gabriel Valley and points east.

The PUC voted 4 to 0 in favor of Burbank-Glendale’s proposal to redraw the geographic split so that their communities can stay in the 818 area with the rest of the San Fernando Valley.

“Burbank and Glendale both explained convincingly that their ties with the San Fernando Valley are much greater than with the San Gabriel Valley,” said Kyle DeVine, a PUC spokeswoman.

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The decision capped a heavy week of lobbying by Burbank Mayor Bill Wiggins and Glendale City Councilwoman Mary Ann Plumley, who made numerous trips to plead their case with all five PUC commissioners. In the past week alone, Wiggins made three trips to San Francisco to meet with PUC officials.

“I’m just thrilled. All the commissioners were opened-minded and they listened to our city’s concerns,” Wiggins said.

Burbank City Manager Robert R. Ovrom said he was happily shocked by the turnaround and credited Wiggins and others for their intensive lobbying.

“We’re just ecstatic. We thought that was a losing cause,” Ovrom said. “That’s just an amazing victory.

At the same time, the PUC rejected Monterey Park’s request to flip-flop the area codes, allowing the San Gabriel Valley to stay in 818, and impose the 626 area code in the San Fernando Valley.

Among other things, Monterey Park officials argued that its large Chinese American community consider the number 8 to represent good fortune, while the numbers 626 are unlucky.

Coping with a flurry of new area codes has become a way of life in the past decade for businesses and consumers across the country because of a surge in phone numbers as a result of the boom in fax machines, cellular phones, computers and pagers that have overloaded the telecommunications industry.

Pacific Bell has said that the 818 area code would run out of new phone numbers by 1998. So about a year ago, a telecommunications industry group recommended an almost even geographic split of the 818 area code, where the 626 area code would have been imposed along the western edge of Burbank.

Earlier this month, Administrative Law Judge Philip Weismehl ruled in support of the proposal. Industry officials expected the PUC to go along with the judge’s ruling.

But on Monday, after Burbank and Glendale officials wrapped up their lobbying campaign, Weismehl redrafted his decision and the PUC officially went along with it, DeVine said.

Wiggins and Plumley had told PUC members that there is a natural geographic separation of Burbank and Glendale from Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley.

They also talked about the lagging economy in the San Fernando Valley and of local businesses that would have to bear the cost to order new stationary, advertising and the technological costs of converting phone lines.

Smaller firms typically face several thousand dollars in costs when an area code changes. “It would have been even more devastating for smaller businesses who are working on tighter budgets,” Plumley said.

“All area code splits are bad,” said Linda Bonniksen, a Pacific Bell spokeswoman. “And more power to Glendale and Burbank. But it’s probably not much comfort to Monterey Park, or other customers in the San Gabriel Valley.”

Tuesday’s decision caught many by surprise, including Pacific Bell, which is in charge of administering the new area code.

“Pacific Bell is generally used to winning cases like this,” said attorney Helen Mickiewicz, who is with the PUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates. “In this case, they kind of got outgunned. PacBell did not know how serious Burbank and Glendale were” in personally lobbying the utility commissioners.

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By adopting the more lopsided geographic split, the life span of the revamped 818 area code will dramatically shorten, PacBell says. The 818 are code will last from three to five years before another split is needed, compared to 12 to 43 years for the 626 area code.

But Norman Pedersen, an attorney for the cities of Burbank and Glendale, said that by next decade all the technical glitches will have been worked out so that a new method of “overlay” area codes could be introduced instead of needing another geographic split.

Pac Bell was in the awkward position of defending the proposed 818 / 626 area code split before the PUC, even though the company favored the overlay method, under which a new area code is added on top of an existing area code, so that old phone numbers stay the same while only new phones take on a new area code.

The Federal Communications Commission has set a December 1997 deadline for Los Angeles-area phone companies to put into service a more sophisticated technology called permanent number portability, which would allow customers to switch local phone companies without having to change numbers.

Times staff writer Efrain Hernandez Jr. contributed to this story.

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Dividing by Numbers

The Public Utilities Commission voted Tuesday to redraw the new 626 area code split so that Burbank, Glendale, La Crescenta and La Canada would remain in the 818 area code. Here are some of the communities the proposed code would serve.

818

Northridge, San Fernando, Sunland-Tujunga, Canoga Park, North Hollywood, La Crescenta, Glendale, Sherman Oaks, Calabasas, Agoura.

626

Mt. Wilson, Pasadena, Monrovia, Alhambra, Covina, Monterey Park