Council Seeks a Delay on Tunnel to Nowhere

The Los Angeles City Council unanimously asked the city’s redevelopment agency on Wednesday to postpone its plans to spend nearly $1 million on a partly built downtown transit tunnel that goes nowhere and may never carry any passengers.

Councilman Ernani Bernardi, calling the proposed expenditure a “needless waste of tax dollars,” initially called on the Community Redevelopment Agency to cease work on the Bunker Hill Transit Tunnel.

But other council members persuaded Bernardi to amend his motion, instead asking the CRA to merely delay spending any money until the council can question CRA officials on their motives.

“I do want to hear the facts,” said Councilman Joel Wachs, adding that publicity about such expenditures gives ammunition to those fighting the construction of mass-transit projects in Los Angeles.

“It undoes a lot of the public support,” he said.

The Times reported Sunday that the CRA, the city-affiliated agency that dispenses funds for redevelopment projects, intended to consider a $976,000 construction contract to extend an underground tunnel that roughly parallels 3rd Street between Hill and Flower streets.

The contract was only part of at least $3.8 million in federal and local funds to be used over the next several years to build the tunnel, a concrete-walled structure about 15 feet high and up to 28 feet wide.

The tunnel once was part of the downtown people mover transit system, a $259-million proposal killed by the Reagan Administration and Congress in 1981. The system would have incorporated the Bunker Hill tunnel into a system of small passenger-carrying coaches running along elevated pathways above the city’s streets.

But with the people mover project killed, the tunnel connects with no planned transit route. Nevertheless, CRA officials said they intend to someday incorporate it in a future transit project--although they concede that they do not know how, why or when that would be accomplished.

Officials also said they fear that if they do not move ahead with construction of the tunnel, they will lose $3 million in federal funds due the city from the people mover project.

Bernardi, a critic of the people mover before its demise, charged that rather than planning for the future, the CRA was exhibiting a “spend-it-or-lose-it philosophy.”

The CRA board is scheduled to consider the tunnel contract Monday. CRA officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday and it was unclear whether they would postpone the awarding of the contract as the City Council asked.