Derailing L.A.

Damien Goodmon stands on the sidewalk a few feet from the railroad tracks next to Dorsey High School and looks like a prosecutor about to prove his case in court. He stops talking about underpasses and overpasses and environmental racism long enough to soak in the scene. Classes have ended for the day and dozens of students crowd onto the sidewalk, some overflowing into the street. A few rowdy types push one another in the playful chaos that marks the end of the school day. Goodmon believes the daily exodus at the South L.A. school nails his case: It will be impossible to keep students out of the path of the Expo Line light-rail trains when they start running some 50 feet north of the campus in a couple of years.

Maybe he’s got a point. Or, more likely, his concerns about safety are addressed by a redesigned intersection that calls for an expansive pedestrian waiting area and double gates and a human crossing guard standing watch during school hours while the trains lumber by at slow speeds.

And, just as likely, this is about more than Dorsey High School.

Goodmon’s goals go beyond making this the safest possible crossing. A grassroots political organizer who oversaw the youth vote for Wesley Clark in 2004, he insists that he’s not out to derail light rail. But his critics believe that his tactics could kill the Expo Line project. He wants to halt the project in its current form and place the

L.A.-Culver City line underground. Along the way, he’s aligned himself with remnants of some of the same ugly forces that have impeded mass transit since racism and fears about people of color flooding into Westside neighborhoods stopped the Red Line subway in the 1980s.

Whatever is going on here at the corner of Farmdale Avenue and Exposition Boulevard, it threatens to get messier for the first phase of the line already taking shape downtown, from the Seventh Street station, where it will share tracks with the Blue Line, to Culver City, roughly following the Exposition right-of-way used by freight trains starting in the late 1800s. Work is well underway on the line shooting down the middle of Exposition Boulevard, between USC and the Natural History Museum.

The dispute over the Dorsey crossing carries some of the same burdens that have weighed heavily on the past three decades of L.A.’s transit history. The forces of racism blamed for the broken network of public transportation crop up here. When the idea of the Expo Line first emerged in the 1980s, project planners faced death threats from Westside residents. In the affluent Cheviot Hills, some residents objected to the train running along the perimeter of their neighborhood, even though the drone of the nearby freeway fills the air. Some of these residents want the Expo Line, in its second phase, to bypass their community and take an out-of-the way route along Venice and Sepulveda boulevards, before eventually reaching Santa Monica. It’s as though residents fear people of color will invade their neighborhoods, stealing their widescreen TVs before returning home on an eastbound train. Today, more Cheviot Hills residents favor the Expo Line than decades ago, but an exact route for Phase Two of the project, from Culver City to Santa Monica, has yet to be decided.

The Public Utilities Commission, which has yet to sign off on the Dorsey crossing, will likely schedule full-blown evidentiary hearings next month to figure out if the street-level crossing there now must be changed.

“It’s very safe,” said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has made improving public transportation in Los Angeles a priority of his administration. “I recognize there are a lot of concerns about it and that’s natural whenever you have children and young people at school. There might be some adjustments made. But it’s as safe as the Gold Line. There was a lot of concern when the Gold Line was built.”

Goodmon is getting some traction with at least the part of his spiel that pertains to Dorsey. People in power are listening to him. He got L.A. Unified to take a stand against the crossing, and says his strongest ally is school board member Marguerite LaMotte, who calls the crossing a case of environmental racism. Goodmon says he has no allies on the Expo Line governing board, though the board last week approved a $250,000 study to examine ways to redesign the Dorsey crossing. The least expensive option calls for walling off the entire street and building a pedestrian bridge over the tracks. Also to be considered are a tunnel and an overpass. Of course, none of those alternatives will satisfy Goodmon, who wants the entire project built underground.

The Expo Board, fearing that they’ll get sued whatever they do, vanished behind closed doors last week to discuss the issues and reemerged 45 minutes later to unanimously vote in favor of the environmental study. Goodmon and his supporters cheered when Vice-Chairman Herb Wesson announced that the study would explore the costly underground alternative. Putting the tracks underground could cost more than $100 million and end up killing the project. Anything less will not satisfy Goodmon. “Even if they came up with $25 million for an overpass, it would not address the noise and vibration standards,” he says. “I say find a little more and build an underpass.”

If Goodmon gets what he wants, the Expo light-rail line could turn into a short, deformed version of the 8.8-mile link now planned to end in Culver City. The line would go only so far as it could stretch in a trench until money ran out. Goodmon says he would help the Expo governing board lobby for more government money to finish the project.

Goodmon grew up in South L.A. and graduated from Loyola High School. He played football for one year at the University of Washington and returned home when his stepfather died. After the 2004 election, he signed on to a project examining the youth vote for a semester at Harvard University. “Could I have gotten into Harvard and finished there? Yeah,” says Goodmon, a thin African-American man, with tufts of facial hair. “I could have got in.”

While in Cambridge, he became a fan of commuter trains. “I saw the value a rail system could have on an area.” Soon after returning home he found himself at his first community meeting on the Expo Line project.

He knows some opponents of the light rail line are racists, and that they espouse hateful views that people of color will invade their communities or that property values will decline with greater mobility. “They’re few and far between and none of them are in our leadership. People have their own reasons for supporting or opposing this. What we’ve been able to do is find a position that everybody can get behind. I’m not concerned about who supports this outside my community, to be honest. When you’re in a war, you have to take whatever allies you can get.”

Goodmon speaks passionately and draws from a sheath of documents to make his points, most of which are against the Expo Line in its current state. But he’s got a fairly straightforward way of judging anyone who might share an opinion on the project: “If you can’t help us, shut up and get out of our way.”

The Big Threat

To proponents of the Expo Line, Goodmon’s attempts to upend the project at such a late date – long after the public hearings and reports required before construction begins on such a project – are a textbook case of NIMBYism at its worst. Expo board member and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, whose Westside Third District includes pockets of longstanding resistance to the project, sounded the alarm in his closing remarks at last month’s Move L.A. transit funding conference organized by former Santa Monica Mayor Denny Zane.

In an interview after that meeting, Yaroslavsky unloaded on the forces trying to do in the project even though an Environmental Impact Statement for the first phase was certified by the MTA board, approved by the Expo board, and construction is under way. Yaroslavsky’s message: Opponents lost, and should move on rather than try again to kill the project.

“If we want to build an integrated mass transit system in the region, we can’t allow one intersection, one grade-crossing, to frustrate efforts,” says Yaroslavsky. “We have had controversies on every line we’ve built, underground, at-grade, and above-grade. If I had succumbed to neighborhood opposition, there wouldn’t be an Orange Line or a Pasadena Gold Line.”

He contends that, while community safety concerns about the Dorsey crossing are important to address, many of those issues are raised by the opponents of the project in general, in hopes to kill it. “Some community residents who are against the line in the first place and want the line to be stopped completely – they, and Dorsey High School, which never commented on the EIS before, never raised an objection before about the line coming adjacent to the school – are opposing it. It got elevated politically by a school board member who represents the area, and in effort to accommodate the school in good faith, there have been discussions between the Expo board and the school district to see what it would take to satisfy their concerns.”

But Yaroslavsky doesn’t see his good faith being returned. While he remains open to considering alternatives, he believes Expo opponents’ suggestions of burying the line from east of the high school to La Brea Avenue would not only be cost-prohibitive but also logistically impossible because of an underground flood channel in the area.

In the end, though, the supervisor maintains that the current street-level crossing would be safe, and is consistent with similar crossings that already exist. “We have built at-grade light rail lines throughout the region. There’s one right next to Ramona High School in East L.A. that is literally tangential to the high school property. We have the Orange Line busway – [it] runs by a number of schools. The Gold Line runs by a number of schools. The MTA and the Exposition Light Rail Authority have criteria for when they grade-separate a line, and [Dorsey] didn’t meet the criteria.”

Looking to alternatives, Yaroslavsky says that the MTA has three choices. He says Metro can proceed with the project as approved, build a pedestrian bridge to block people from the tracks, or build an elevated track from east of Farmdale, the street that runs in front of Dorsey High, to west of La Brea, the busy intersection where an aerial crossing is already planned.

The third option “is fraught with difficulty,” says Yaroslavsky. “I am certain an elevated line would be much more controversial. It would be unsightly, it would be noisy.”

Opponents must accept that the project has been approved and will be built, he says. “You continuously fine-tune it, but you don’t stop a project, or set a condition on its completion that’s unattainable, thus killing the project,” the supervisor says. “Building an underground subway because the LAUSD doesn’t want a light rail next to Dorsey High School, when it has them next to a number of other schools in their jurisdiction, is not a reasonable demand. I wouldn’t support an underground subway there any more than I would one next to Ramona High School … or the number of schools around the Gold Line.”

Yaroslavsky still hopes for a resolution that will keep the project on track. Closing off the crossing to cars and people and building a pedestrian bridge over the tracks should satisfy opponents who say safety is the No. 1 issue, but that plan has gotten a chilly reception from opponents. “The people who opposed this project in the first place, they want to send this underground because they know it would break the back of the project. Interestingly, some of the folks in Cheviot Hills are also joining with the Dorsey people to put it underground,” he says.

“When you strip away all the B.S., this is really about whether we build a transit line to integrate with the rest of the regional transportation system or not.”

MTA’s David Mieger, who helped develop Metro’s criteria for what crossings should get what treatment, says Metro consulted with “a company that works with the PUC all around the state.” Those guidelines were developed in 2003, he says, in part to show that Metro’s plans for crossings are not arbitrary or influenced by the powerful at the expense of the powerless.

“The first screening criteria is traffic volumes and geometry of the street – is it physically possible to operate a train through an intersection?” Mieger says, citing the La Brea and La Cienega crossings as places where traffic wouldn’t allow street-level crossings. “Then they went through traffic operations, rail operations, and safety.”

Eric Olson, Metro’s Chief Project Officer for the Expo Line, says the Dorsey crossing plans that’s before the PUC include numerous safety features to protect the 500 or so students who will cross the tracks in the morning and the 600 who will cross them on the way home in the afternoon. Among the measures: several types of pedestrian and vehicle gates, as well as lights, bells and plazas for students to wait in while the trains pass. “Basically it’s state-of-the-art safety features,” Olson says. “It’s modeled after the Pasadena Gold Line.” Nearby, sound walls will keep train noise in the neighborhood and at the school within state and federal limits. Metro may slow the train to 20 to 25 mph from its normal speed of 55 mph when it passes the school.

City Councilmember Herb Wesson is vice-chair of the Expo board. He’s the only board member to come out publicly in support of an aerial or underground crossing, known as “grade separations” in transit planning jargon. “We’ve been really focused and concerned with safety issues with the intersection at Farmdale Avenue. We’ve been pushing for a grade-separation there,” says Andrew Westall, senior deputy to Wesson.

Last December, the PUC approved all but two of the 38 Expo Line crossings, the one at Dorsey and one further east at Foshay Learning Center, where a pedestrian-only tunnel is proposed at Harvard Boulevard.

County Supervisor Yvonne Burke, also a member of the Expo board, said putting the line underground would be difficult because of the flood control system in the area. “From everything that I have read, to go underground, you’d have to start so far back, over 1,000 feet to get down 60 feet. It just gets to be very, very difficult.”

Burke also says that efforts to tunnel underground would be frustrated by Measure A, the 1998 ballot measure that bans spending county money on subway projects. “The only way you could get the money is for the state government to fund it, federal government to fund it, or actually, the school district could put the money up.”

Asked whether she supports an alternative to a street-level crossing, Burke said: “Let’s just see what the PUC comes up with, and we’ll get a full study of it and try to come up with the best approach.”

It’s not yet clear how deeply involved the PUC will get in the matter. Law Judge Kenneth Koss says he will schedule a pre-hearing conference most likely in March to plot out the timeline for the PUC’s steps. One item to be decided is whether an evidentiary hearing is needed, in which proponents and opponents would argue their positions.

“Normally, the whole purpose [of a pre-trial conference] is to schedule an evidentiary hearing, but maybe something will come up” to make an evidentiary hearing unnecessary,” Koss says. If an evidentiary hearing does occur, “the hearing could be anywhere from a day to three days, depending on the volume of testimony and evidence that needs to be put onto the record. Then each party gets to file a brief, and then send responses to the [other side’s] briefs. I take that all into consideration, then write a proposed decision, and that decision goes out for a comment period, and … then I incorporate the comments into the decision. Then [the PUC] can say, ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘change the proposal.’”

Though Koss hasn’t established an exact timeline for the proceedings, he hopes to have his decision in front of the PUC quickly. “One of our jobs is to have these things done expeditiously.”

At last Thursday’s Expo board meeting, more than a dozen speakers came out to speak about the project. Karen Leonard, co-chairman of Light Rail for Cheviot, urged the board to stay on track. “We on the Westside desperately need traffic amelioration, and as soon as possible.”

Darrell Clarke, who started Friends for Expo, told the board caving into opponents and calling for another round of environmental study of the Dorsey crossing will delay the project. “They’re demanding this – never mind that the decision for this project was made in 2005. The choice was between a busway or mostly at-grade rail – never an underground system.”

Colleen Heller, of Neighbors for Smart Rail, said her group has been demanding a safe line for years. “One or more of you have said, ‘Where have you been?’ We are not late. You have not been listening. The coalition – then and now – is concerned about the safety of our students, the impacts on our traffic and the integrity of our neighborhoods throughout the Exposition corridor. Don’t ask where we’ve been. Ask yourselves where have you been and why?”

Longtime resident of Leimert Park and a foe of the project, Clint Simmons, said, “Anyone with common sense would know it’s a no-brainer: You cannot have a train traveling less than 50 feet from a high school without having some problems.”

Of course, the politicians remember hearing these same protests years ago. They just thought they’d moved beyond them when they approved the project in 2005.

The political challenge

“Light rail is what we considered the backbone of that community plan,” says Burroughs, who views the train as a means of upward mobility. “You will be able to go to nursery school, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and get an advanced degree all in schools along this line and never have to buy a car. That’s a savings of close to $6,000 a year tax-free.”

Two decades ago, Burroughs and about 15 others got together to champion the idea of the Expo Line. It wasn’t a popular cause. “We were fighting elected leaders at the time – a lot of them received resources from neighborhoods that were very much against this proposal. But that’s changing. There’s a group in Cheviot Hills that is in favor of light rail on the existing right-of-way.”

Burroughs remembers an evil side to the early opposition. “The project staff early on received death threats, and they didn’t receive them from the mid-city folks. They received them from folks west. They were reported, but not prosecuted.”

The gist of the threats to the civil servants: “Next time I see you in my neighborhood doing an assessment, you will die,” says Burroughs, who feels that racism continues to be a factor. “Now the element has grown up. The element is still there, but they are reduced in importance.”

Like his coalition, and the merging of forces with Darrell Clarke of Santa Monica and Friends for Expo, the critics of the Expo Line also found each other in different parts of the city. “People who don’t want it in Cheviot Hills and people who don’t want in South L.A., these groups who generally don’t have anything to do with each other in normal circumstances, came together. The same thing with Friends for Expo. Darrell Clarke was working on this issue on the Westside and I was working on this issue in the mid-city area, and all of a sudden, we hook up. And the Internet comes on line and we have a coalition. We have some 2,500 people watching this project worldwide.”

And what those people are hearing could be troubling them right now, as they await the next move by the PUC, L.A. Unified, and the Expo board. Particularly, if they are in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., and wondering if this major project with three decades of history will fulfill its promise.

“What elected official wants to be in office when this project is withdrawn during construction?” wonders Burroughs. “That would be a stain on the political landscape of Southern California that would be very hard to remove for a long time.” The word would go out that, “You had a beautiful project parallel to the Santa Monica Freeway, and you blew it. We’re not going to give you any more money. Take a hike.”

Emma Gallegos contributed to this story.