Lurching Toward the Surf

Monday, April 30, 2012

Page 11

SNIPPETS (Column)

Lurching Toward the Surf

By MARC HAEFELE

It was something like three years ago that I attended an official MTA-public meeting in the Beverly Hills Public Library conference room about bringing the Purple Line subway through the West Side. Local residents who attended were confronted by Metro officials with charts, Power Points and publications about the proposed and long-planned long leap from the subway’s present terminus at Western Avenue toward Santa Monica Beach.

As I reported at the time, the big news of the event seemed to be that Metro was not, at that time, actually planning on taking the heavy rail train into Santa Monica. What seemed to be the preferred route stopped somewhere between Westwood and Centinela Avenue. One official suggested this was due to the notorious flammability of Santa Monica politics. The consensus seemed to be leave the Santa Monica Pier station for another time—or maybe another era.

There seemed to be a bit of disappointment among the Beverly Hillsers attending that hearing that the line would not go directly to the sea. But that was the only serious negativity that I recall. In that instant, there seemed to be a broad forgetting that the Purple Line, in order to get to either Westwood or Santa Monica, would in fact have to pass through and under the Westside’s fabled Little Citadel of Class itself.

Since then, the penny seems to have dropped in Beverly Hills. Enough so that the entire $5.6 billion, 9-mile project was given a few weeks hiatus Thursday until the people of that town can be once more summoned to tourney with the region’s transit establishment and its political supporters. This time, one may assume, things will not go so gently as they did before.

As the Times reported, Beverly Hills Unified School District President Brian Goldberg seems to expect the hearing to persuade Metro to move a key local station from its proposed site on Constellation Boulevard, where it would serve Century City, to a location on Santa Monica Boulevard, where it would serve a major golf course. If Metro doesn’t do that, Goldberg said, “a lawsuit is absolutely on the table.”

He said the district had already spent $2 million on the issue. Most of the region’s school districts, one would assume, would have a lot of better things to do with that kind of money.

The major grievance here is that the Constellation halt would involve tunneling under Beverly Hills High—perhaps the most sacred parcel of all of Beverly Hills’ sacred ground. Of course, there is already a working oil well complex centered on the campus. But since that facility packs in the local revenues, no one seems to mind it much. The Hillsers would prefer that the subway tunneling go instead along Santa Monica Boulevard paralleling what others describe as an earthquake fault. Safety factors aside, the Constellation stop would serve most of the 40,000 people who work at Century City—that towering fraction of Mid-Town Manhattan that somehow appeared as if by magic on West LA’s sprawling plains some 50 years ago. According to Susan Bursk of the Century City Chamber of Commerce, nearly 29,000 people within a quarter mile of the station are likely to use it to commute to or from work. That’s probably not counting the platoons of Century City lawyers who could take the trains to and from the downtown courts and leave their Benzes in their office garages..

How many golfers would benefit from the alternative station placement isn’t too clear. But I don’t want to seem too snide. Nimbyism is as American as the mosquito and athlete’s foot. Cheviot Hills objected to the Expo Line’s routing. As did South LA. The Beverly Hills hearing will be held, the same objections will be heard, along with the same rebuttals. Unless the school district gets lucky in court, the line is likely to be built along its safest and most efficient alignment—under the High. Meanwhile, the construction is planned only for the four miles from Western to La Cienega.

What the Beverly Hills hearing delay will mean in terms of the decade or more it will probably take to complete the route is unclear. But one thing is clear. Everytime a nimby group arises to oppose the Westside subway, the support behind it seems to solidify more. A project that began with a few symbolic shovelsful of earth 30 years ago in a prevailing cloud of skepticism has reached the consensus level. Even the Beverly Hills route opponents hasten to say they don’t object to the idea—just to having it in, or rather, under, their own back yard.