To enrage all the people is a high-water mark in civic achievement. : Light Rail Blues

The citizens advisory panel charged with recommending a light-rail transit route through the San Fernando Valley has at long last achieved a goal sought by citizens advisory committees since the day Eve recommended that Adam eat the apple. The panel has effectively managed to enrage absolutely everyone.

It is an accomplishment not to be taken lightly. Many citizens groups over the centuries have been able to enrage some of the people and a few have even managed to enrage most of the people, but to have enraged all of the people is a high-water mark in civic achievement that future generations will regard with envy.

The way the panel attained its goal was magnificent in concept and dazzling in execution.

Faced with the necessity to select one of two bitterly opposed routes through the Valley, the panel responded with Olympian skill: it voted to recommend both of the hated routes.

It was a stunning climax to months of meetings, a triumph that is easily the emotional equivalent of Roger Bannister’s conquest of the 4-minute mile.

There is one small difference. No one wanted to murder Bannister at the conclusion of his performance.

For years, both the city and county have wrestled with the problem of where to place a light-rail line through the Valley.

For an equal number of years, they have been lobbied by individuals and organizations demanding that the line not be placed anywhere near their neighborhood due to its attendant noise, congestion and the kinds of people who utilize public transportation.

There was not a freeway, boulevard, cul-de-sac or alley that was generally acceptable as a train route. Public forums to determine which of 11 paths would cause the least amount of chaos quickly degenerated into chaos themselves.

Threats were shouted at the meetings, fists shaken, and demands made by people with no more activism in their backgrounds than shooshing kids off the lawn. Big Business came under attack. Whispers of racism were heard. Dogs howled. Men cursed. Women cried.

Municipal governments are composed of earnest but simple people who regard the necessity to make a controversial decision as a personal sacrifice not unlike nailing oneself to a cross. They’d rather not.

Members of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission tried last year to designate a route, but abandoned the effort in the face of 700 opponents calling for their heads, and for whatever else seemed accessible. The commissioners scurried for safety like rats on the Titanic.

The matter then fell to the Los Angeles City Council, an organization not known for either intellectual achievement or raw courage.

The council, acutely aware of public response to the county effort, cleverly appointed a 32-member citizens panel to recommend which of the routes would be most acceptable, thus establishing the future possibility of laying any blame for disaster into the hands of a separate entity. When all else fails, blame the people.

I have dealt with citizen advisory panels for many years and know for a fact that individuals who accept appointment to such committees suffer from a pathology that manifests itself in various forms of social suicide.

Lawyer’s wives, retired postal employees, unfrocked evangelists, cultural foundation volunteers and failed candidates for menial public office often fall into this category.

They troop like psychiatric outpatients to each open forum harboring the sick hope that they and they alone will cast the vote that will result in their own humiliating social demise.

The light-rail advisory panel was perfect for them. It was clear from the beginning that there was no solution to the problem. East-west routes met roaring disapproval. North-south routes met roaring disapproval. Over-ground routes met roaring disapproval. Underground routes met roaring disapproval.

It all seemed to somehow come down to the aforementioned two most-hated routes, one along the Ventura Freeway and the other through residential neighborhoods from North Hollywood to Warner Center.

The citizens advisory panel, in a triumph of ambiguity that will live as long as humanity seeks the Perfect Solution to Almost Everything, voted to recommend both routes, thus emerging as monsters not only to those who favored one route over another but also to those who wanted no route at all.

Now it goes to the City Council again and then to the county Transportation Commission again and then possibly to God or to a board of gods for a final decision.

I find it unsettling that a need as vital as public transportation should meet with so much howling protest. But notwithstanding the bedlam, uproar cannot be allowed to deny the construction of a rail line that should have been built 30 years ago.

It’s time for a decision more precise than that offered by the citizens panel. A neighborhood will have to be sacrificed, and under the circumstances, any neighborhood will do.

Providing, of course, it isn’t mine.