Transit Panel Puts Limit on Comments by the Public

A 32-member committee formed to determine how to meet the San Fernando Valley’s transit needs met for the first time Thursday night and immediately quarreled over how to accomplish its sweeping task.

The Los Angeles City Council-created body, called the Citizens Advisory Panel on Transportation Solutions, has been given only four months to sift through an array of Valley transit proposals and make recommendations.

But Thursday night the group spent most of its time trying to decide how much it wanted to hear from the public.

Several members raised the specter of “anarchistic” opponents of light rail dominating meetings with lengthy protests.

After 90 minutes of debate, committee members decided to reserve the first half-hour of each meeting for public comment.

The committee was formed after the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission in November abandoned its years-long attempt to find an east-west rail route for the Valley. The commission acted after all five proposed routes encountered stiff opposition from residents.

Opponents said their single-family neighborhoods would be ruined by noise, vibrations and visual blight caused by the trolley line, which gets power from overhead electric lines.

Evidence of Support Needed

Commissioners, who are building a countywide network of trolley lines using the extra half-cent sales tax voters approved in 1980, said they would not again consider a Valley line unless local elected officials designated a route and provided evidence of public support.

Shortly before the commission’s decision, six long-established homeowner organizations joined forces with several anti-trolley coalitions formed earlier in neighborhoods targeted for light rail.

The combined forces were “too much for us to go against,” commission member Jacki Bacharach, who led the move to drop the Valley trolley study, said at the time.

Although the committee was formed at the urging of the county Transportation Commission, it is expected to study alternatives to light rail. Those include building busways and subsidizing bus service, extending the Metro Rail subway east or north of its planned terminus in North Hollywood or Studio City, and considering County Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s proposed monorail or magnetic-levitation train along the Ventura and Hollywood freeways from Westlake Village to downtown Los Angeles.

Despite the key role light-rail foes played in derailing the Valley trolley in November, they seem to be little represented on the council’s committee.

Apparently reflecting the council’s oft-declared pro-trolley sentiment, the committee has only five members affiliated with the drive to halt consideration of the trolley.

“It does seem somewhat stacked to me,” said Tom Herman, chairman of the North Hollywood-based Eastern Sector Transit Coalition, which has drummed up crowds of more than 700 at public hearings to protest light-rail routes that traverse their community. In contrast, more than a dozen members of the council’s committee have publicly declared their advocacy of light rail.

Included on the committee are Richard Smith, an Encino property owner leader, and Roger L. Stanard, a Warner Center attorney, who are co-founders of the Campaign for Valley Rail Transit. The campaign, supported by 27 business, civic and homeowner organizations, kicked off Monday with a rally in Van Nuys.

Plans to Lead Fight

Stanard, who also serves on the Transportation Commission’s Rail Construction Committee, said his group plans to lead the fight for light rail, “particularly if we see the council’s panel faltering.”

Among the trolley routes that had been under study by the county commission, the most controversial would follow the little-used Southern Pacific freight line from North Hollywood to Warner Center via Chandler Boulevard and Oxnard Street east of the San Diego Freeway, and Victory Boulevard and Topham Street west of the freeway.

Other lines that have been under study are the Ventura Freeway; the Los Angeles River; the Southern Pacific main line, which runs diagonally across the Valley between North Hollywood and Chatsworth, and a route that follows Victory Boulevard and Topham Street.