Derailing L.A.

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.