Group Starts Petition Drive to Extend Metro Rail : Transportation: The proposed subway line would link North Hollywood to the Sepulveda Basin. Homeowner groups’ reactions are mixed.

A state senator and two city councilmen, joined by representatives of San Fernando Valley homeowner and business groups, Friday announced a petition drive to extend the northern end of the Metro Rail subway westward from North Hollywood to the Sepulveda Basin.

The proposed extension, which state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana) co-authored with Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude, is among 10 options along two routes that the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission will consider for the Valley. Current plans call for Metro Rail to link downtown, where the southern end is now under construction, to North Hollywood, with light-rail lines perhaps crossing the Valley westward from there.

The final routing decision rests with the commission, which is charged with creating a county-wide rail network using the extra half-cent sales tax that voters authorized in 1980.

The commission’s decision is expected in March.

Robbins said Friday that he expects to garner tens of thousands of signatures to present to the transportation commissioners, hoping that will persuade them to adopt his plan.

“We have to do something,” he said. “By the year 2000, the average speed on San Fernando Valley freeways will be 17 m.p.h. and motorists on the Ventura Freeway will travel 7 m.p.h at rush hour.”

The proposed 7.6-mile extension would cost $1.3 billion and draw 49,000 riders daily by the year 2010, according to a recently completed environmental report.

Following the route of the Southern Pacific right of way, the extension would link North Hollywood with the Sepulveda Basin, where riders bound for the West Valley would transfer to buses.

It would run underground from the Hollywood Freeway to Hazeltine Avenue, then aboveground from Hazeltine to Balboa Boulevard.

The Robbins-Braude plan has been hailed as a compromise uniting residential and business factions that previously supported competing proposals. Under the compromise, businesses gave up their goal of an immediate 15-mile rail link to fast-growing Warner Center, and homeowner leaders agreed to accept the dust and noise that would accompany tunneling through residential neighborhoods in North Hollywood and Van Nuys.

Braude, who supports the petition drive, did not appear with Robbins at a news conference in the Van Nuys State Building. But Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky did, along with representatives of resident groups and chambers of commerce across the Valley.

Richard Smith, representing the Encino Property Owners Assn. and the Campaign for Valley Rail Transit, said a rail line would help preserve the quality of life in the Valley, and he described opponents of the plan as “zero-growth advocates who don’t recognize that everyone’s interest will be served through this compromise.”

But Homeowners of Encino President Gerald A. Silver said his group and the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn. are among several organizations that oppose the plan because of its high cost and the disturbance that a rail line would create in quiet Valley neighborhoods.

He said controls on residential and commercial growth--not subways--are the answer to the Valley’s increasing traffic and air quality problems.

“The whole thing takes us one step closer to Manhattan,” Silver said of the Robbins-Braude plan. “Many of us don’t want to see the Valley gutted by transit and converted into Manhattan.”