Rail Line’s Fate May Rest With the Voters : Transportation: County staff have ranked a Valley line behind two others for funding. If the full commission agrees, a gas-tax hike on the June ballot may become the line’s best hope.

For months, San Fernando Valley business, civic and community leaders have been preparing to fight to have a Valley rail line built instead of two competing lines elsewhere in the county.

Battle plans, including a demonstration of solid support from the Los Angeles City Council and specially tailored legislation in Sacramento, were based on the assumption that there was only enough money to build one more area rail line in this century.

But March 16, with Valley rail proponents moving on all fronts, Los Angeles County Transportation Commission staff members released a report that sowed confusion and dissension. The report recommended that all three lines be built over the next 11 years--but that the Valley line be built last.

The Valley line, a 5.6-mile westward extension to the San Diego Freeway of the downtown-to-North Hollywood Metro Rail subway, was ranked behind a 2.5-mile northern spur from the western terminus of the Century Freeway light-rail line to Los Angeles International Airport and a 13.5-mile light-rail line from downtown to Pasadena.

The 11-member commission, comprised of the five county supervisors, Mayor Tom Bradley, four council members from various cities and one member of the public, is scheduled to make the final decision on the staff plan Wednesday.

The 11-year, $2.2-billion plan devised by the transportation commission staff rests on the hope that California voters on June 5 will approve ballot propositions that would raise the gasoline tax by nine cents per gallon and allow the sale of billions of dollars in rail construction bonds. Staff members say they only recently got the text of the propositions and determined that the measures would yield $1.2 billion for county rail construction.

Without voter approval of Propositions 108 and 111, the $2.2-billion plan will be scrapped and only one line is likely to be built, staff members warn.

Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude, a co-architect of the Valley Metro Rail extension proposal, said that before release of the commission staff’s plan, “I figured there would be one line chosen and the other two would be losers and the Valley’s prospects weren’t good.”

But the staff’s plan, in which work on the Valley line would start in 1996 and be completed in 2001, struck Braude as “a reasonable proposal and one that I am satisfied with.”

The councilman, who represents Encino, termed “persuasive” the commission staff’s argument that because the downtown Metro Rail to North Hollywood is not scheduled to open until 2001, it makes little sense to build a cross-Valley extension before it can be connected to the main line.

But other elected officials were not persuaded by that rationale and some even think the Valley is getting cheated. An early casualty of the commission staff’s plan was the carefully crafted consensus that had formed over the past year on behalf of a cross-Valley Metro Rail extension.

If there is money for more rail projects, City Councilman Joel Wachs said, then it should go to speeding up the tunneling of the Metro Rail line to North Hollywood instead of being used to build other light-rail projects.

“They should fulfill their commitment to the Valley to get the subway there from downtown before anything else,” said Wachs, who represents an East Valley district.

He and others noted that the target date for Metro Rail’s completion to North Hollywood has in recent years been postponed several times, and that even the 2001 date is contingent on receipt of federal aid that has not been secured.

Councilwoman Joy Picus, citing recent suggestions by the Bush Administration that local governments should pay a larger share of transportation costs, expressed doubt that Metro Rail would ever reach North Hollywood.

Despite the differences of opinion among council members, they voted 12-3 Wednesday for a resolution urging the transportation commission to make the Metro Rail extension its “No. 1 priority.”

Braude described the vote as a symbolic gesture, but others said it put the commission on notice that the city wants the Valley line built before the Pasadena and Los Angeles International Airport projects.

Several noted that there is a shortfall of more than $300 million in the 11-year plan and that the commission staff’s has suggested that affected cities--Los Angeles, Pasadena and South Pasadena--make up at least part of the deficit.

“We could play hardball and use that leverage,” Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said.

The proposed Valley line would be built in the Southern Pacific Railroad right of way that parallels Chandler and Victory boulevards. In the industrial area between Hazeltine Avenue and the line’s terminus at the San Diego Freeway south of Victory Boulevard, the tracks would be at ground-level.

State Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana), who was co-architect with Braude of the Metro Rail extension plan, took a moderate stance regarding the commission staff’s plan.

He said that although it is “not acceptable as it is, I think it can be fixed rather easily.”

Robbins is the author of an Assembly bill that seeks to allay homeowner fears of noise from ground-level trains by requiring that the tracks be underground in residential neighborhoods east of Hazeltine Avenue. He said he will demand Wednesday that the commission set aside money now for the Valley project or “give us some other guarantee that the extension to Van Nuys will actually be built.”

He also said that he was “not totally convinced” that the segment from Hollywood to North Hollywood cannot be finished before 2001, as transportation commission staff members insist.

Robbins said he also will insist that the commission provide interim mass transit for the Valley over the next 11 years to “relieve the congestion that already has us swamped and will get worse before this line is finished.”

He suggested that trackless trolleys--buses powered by overhead electric lines--could be operated parallel to the future east-west rail route, but said he was not sure they “would be appropriate on Chandler Boulevard,” a residential street.

Despite the overwhelming council vote to give the Valley line top priority, Councilman Richard Alatorre, the only Los Angeles Council member on the transportation commission, predicted that no more than three of the 11 commissioners would vote to give the Valley line higher priority.

Alatorre, whose northeast Los Angeles district would be served by the Pasadena line, also said that he would not be bound by the council vote.

Buttressing Alatorre’s prediction of overwhelming support among commissioners for the staff’s plan was a 3 to 1 vote Monday by the commission’s Transit Committee for the plan’s construction schedule.

The dissenting commissioner suggested that the Pasadena line be built before the airport spur but did not quarrel with the Valley’s third place in line.

However, several commissioners expressed surprise that the 11-year-construction plan included $770 million, about half of it local money and half federal, for beginning work on extending Metro Rail west from Hollywood to Westwood and east from downtown to Whittier.

Commissioners argued that because no routes have been adopted for those extensions, they should not be scheduled ahead of projects that are ready to go.