Waxman Rethinks Tunneling Ban

For two decades, one legislator in Washington, D.C., has stood as an immovable barrier to the long-discussed plans to build a subway from downtown Los Angeles to the Westside.

But now, with traffic gridlocked in his district and the Westside in the midst of a continuing development boom that promises to bring even more congestion, Rep. Henry A. Waxman is having second thoughts.

The Los Angeles Democrat is the most prominent of a growing list of people and groups giving the Westside subway another look.

In the mid-1980s, after a methane gas explosion ripped through a Fairfax-area clothing store, Waxman helped lead the effort to halt plans to extend the Metro Red Line subway west under Wilshire Boulevard. Waxman wrote, and Congress passed, legislation to prohibit using federal money to drill the needed tunnels.

Now, 20 years later, the Westside subway is a top priority of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and an expert panel convened at the request of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority concluded recently that the Wilshire subway could be built safely.

That puts the veteran congressman once again in a pivotal position. By repealing the law, Waxman could help resurrect the dream of an underground transit line to the beach, through a part of town that arguably needs public transit the most.

Waxman has asked the panel to produce a written report on its findings.

“If the report confirms what we’ve been hearing, I will introduce a proposal to rescind the restriction,” Waxman said from Washington.

If Waxman does agree to rescind the law, it would mark a milestone for the subway project -- but it would be only a first step toward getting it built.

No funding, federal or otherwise, is earmarked for such a project, and many other regional transit needs would compete with a Red Line extension. Moreover, the per-mile price for subway construction has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, to between $300 million and $350 million.

Still, backers see Waxman’s move as key.

“I would hope the congressman would move in that direction,” said Ray Remy, a longtime Los Angeles County transit official and former president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce who served for eight years in Mayor Tom Bradley’s administrations. “Mayor Bradley always felt that the most productive line was the Wilshire corridor line. It was one of the principal underpinnings to the large subway system he had contemplated.”

Even homeowners who rose up in opposition to the Wilshire subway have mellowed as development has continued apace and traffic has increased.

“Things have gotten progressively worse over the past 20 years, and today we need rapid transit more than we ever did,” said Diana Plotkin, president of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Assn., which includes much of the Fairfax area. “We do need a solution to this horrible traffic problem.”

Assuming that Waxman rescinds his ban, she said, her group would not oppose a subway to the beach, as long as it ran straight out Wilshire Boulevard and the city kept development along Wilshire under control.

On that score, she is skeptical, given the unabated development of retail stores, residences and restaurants in the area in recent years.

Other cities, too, have overcome previous resistance to mass transit on the Westside. Early this year, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood officials said the MTA should revive subway building as a way to ease the region’s transportation problems.

“Westside cities ... are one of the great economic engines” of the region, Mark Egerman told the MTA board in February, when he was the mayor of Beverly Hills. “We are being strangled because we have no integrated transit system with the rest of Los Angeles.”

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A subway to the beach has been on transit proponents’ wish lists for decades. In the early 1980s, transit officials mapped out a plan to take a subway as far west as Fairfax Avenue. It was then intended to head north under Fairfax, doglegging back under the Cahuenga Pass and into North Hollywood.

But disaster struck when a worker punched a time clock in March 1985, igniting a previously undetected accumulation of odorless methane gas in the basement of a Ross Dress for Less store on 3rd Street near Fairfax. The explosion blew off most of the roof and prompted evacuations from four square blocks of shops near the Farmers Market. For days, fiery cracks opened in the earth until the seeping gas was vented.

“Once Ross exploded,” Plotkin said, “we all were just frightened to death and, of course, came out against it.”

Waxman said he, too, had paid little attention to the subway plans. “I was a very strong supporter of the Metro Rail system,” he said. “I voted consistently for the project,” figuring that those plotting the routes “must have known what they were doing.”

The blast raised serious questions, Waxman said. After hearing experts’ testimony and conferring with transit officials, Waxman concluded that the project warranted further study. “I had misgivings about the whole plan,” he said.

In September 1985, he briefly supported a measure to eliminate all federal funding for the project. Then he reached a compromise with Julian Dixon -- the late pro-transit congressman for whom the 7th Street subway station is named -- that allowed the project to proceed but prohibited tunneling in the methane risk zones and required further studies. Waxman’s compromise legislation stopped the subway at Western Avenue.

Although Waxman asserts strongly that safety was his No. 1 concern, many political observers say well-heeled constituents in Hancock Park and elsewhere were opposed to building a Metro stop at Wilshire and Crenshaw boulevards, near a large African American community (Waxman’s 30th District runs through Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Century City west though Westwood, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Malibu).

“There were certain elements of the community then, as opposed to now, whose opposition [to the subway] was based on issues having nothing to do with safety but rather ... politics and race,” said Stephen Kramer, an attorney and president of the Miracle Mile Chamber of Commerce.

To this day, some critics contend that methane concerns became a convenient excuse for Waxman to keep the project from traveling through affluent areas of his district.

Waxman disputes that. So does Kramer: “He wasn’t trying to appease some bigot somewhere. I think methane was a legitimate issue.”

Waxman’s legislation had a profound effect on the Red Line. From Vermont Avenue, the subway eventually headed west under Hollywood Boulevard on the way to the San Fernando Valley.

During construction in June 1995, a 70-by-70-foot sinkhole opened along Hollywood Boulevard. Defects plagued construction. Congress and the Clinton administration pondered whether to pull the financial plug.

In November 1998, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky seized on the public’s frustration with MTA cost overruns and put on the ballot a measure to ban the use of local sales tax dollars for further subway construction. Voters approved it, and the prohibition remains in effect.

To date, 17.4 miles of subway have been built in the region, at a cost of $4.5 billion. Above-ground stretches of the Blue, Green and Gold lines bring the total Metro Rail system to 73.1 miles. None of it is on the Westside, where east-west surface streets and the Santa Monica Freeway are subjected to a daily crush of vehicles.

Yaroslavsky said he was pleased that Waxman was revisiting his ban on federal funding for tunneling in methane zones. It is imperative, he said, that Los Angeles figure out a better way than buses to serve the Wilshire corridor, the most heavily traveled in the city.

“You need to get to Beverly Hills, Century City, Westwood, UCLA,” he said. But getting Waxman to repeal his legislation is only the beginning.

“We’ve got to find funds to dig a hole under Wilshire,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s going to be slow. But with [Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger] talking about a $50-billion infrastructure bond, that opens up an opportunity we haven’t had before.”