Woo Assails Metro Rail Construction Impact Plan : Transit: Councilman and other critics call proposals to mitigate disruption weak, vague and out of touch with needs of community.

With work on the Hollywood Boulevard stretch of Metro Rail scheduled to start in just two months, City Councilman Michael Woo has rejected the Rail Construction Corp.’s plan for dealing with the work’s impact on the area as weak, vague and out of touch with the needs of the economically fragile community.

“It is clearly driven by the oft-quoted RCC motto ‘on time and on budget’--which I forecast will end up being neither, after opposition from Hollywood businesses, residents and city officials is taken into account,” Woo said in a letter to Neil Peterson, executive director of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

Critics--including Woo, business representatives and Hollywood community activists--pointed to the apparent watering down of mitigating measures that had been raised in a series of discussions with Metro Rail officials.

“It is painfully obvious that two years of high-level meetings and many promises have been thrown out wholesale,” Woo said in the letter.

Critics also said that the document lacked provisions for enforcing its promises that efforts will be made to moderate the problems suffered by businesses, residents and commuters during earlier phases of Metro Rail construction.

But transportation officials defended the report, saying that its very existence is an unprecedented concession to local concerns. It will be modified to reflect the complaints, they promised.

“I think we’ve learned a lot of lessons through our construction so far,” said Gilbert R. Saldana, the corporation’s public affairs officer for Hollywood. The RCC is a subsidiary of the county Transportation Commission.

“Sure, there’ve been problems along Wilshire and in the downtown area, and we can’t continue to operate that way and expect the community and businesses to be supportive of Metro Rail,” Saldana said. “At some point it’s going to give, and people are going to be upset about what our disruption is causing their community to turn into.”

Most of the tunneling work will be underground, he said, with major impacts expected around the station sites at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue and at Hollywood and Vine Street, which will be excavated using the cut-and-cover method of digging a big hole and then roofing it.

A third station, at Hollywood and Highland Avenue, is expected to be built by mining underground, he said, which will reduce the impact on surface traffic.

In the mitigation plan, which was released late last month, the corporation says that materials and equipment should be kept off Hollywood Boulevard except for temporary staging areas, which would be limited to 30 days.

An earlier version said that staging would be kept off the boulevard altogether, critics said.

Public affairs officers will be in the area for at least five days a week during key business hours. They will be responsible for recommending modification or shutdown of construction work when there is too much noise, dust or traffic disruption, and when there are safety problems.

Critics said the officers will not have enough authority to deal with the problems, especially in the final phase when contractors push to finish the work on time.

To minimize the disruption, the RCC is recommending that major street-level work be done between midnight and 10 a.m. But the critics said some businesses will be threatened by the late-night noise, especially movie post-production studios that tend to work around the clock.

The plan calls for removing and storing the stars from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but critics want to display the stars in a temporary facility to continue to attract visitors.

They also complained about a provision for sidewalks to be kept free for at least five feet, saying that earlier versions guaranteed 10 feet of access.

Parking and security were areas of concern. Construction officials promised that an effort will be made to ensure that at least 2,300 spaces will remain within “a reasonable proximity” to the live theaters around Hollywood and Vine, and that 1,800 spaces will be maintained near the movie houses in the boulevard’s cinema district.

But merchants were concerned that shoppers will prefer to go elsewhere rather than park in a remote lot and wait for a tram to take them to the boulevard.

“This plan is an important guide and statement of intent that will help to ensure a successful construction mitigation program for the Hollywood community,” the report said.

But at least one property owner in the Wilshire area, bruised by his experiences with Metro Rail, warned Hollywood to be wary.

“It has been brutal and devastating to some of our tenants, and that’s also true of people up and down (Wilshire) Boulevard,” said Wayne Ratkovich, managing general partner of a partnership that owns the Wiltern Center.

Looking out his window at a staging area in front of his landmark theater, office and restaurant complex, he said revenues have dropped in half for many businesses since construction began a year ago.

Problems have included loss of water and power, damage to cars parked in the Wiltern’s underground garage, and chronic traffic congestion, he said.

“We were promised by Neil Peterson that there would be no resemblance to what happened in downtown L.A.,” he said. “We thought that meant it would be significantly better. It turned out to be significantly worse. . . . So when it comes to Hollywood, all I can say is, ‘Look out and don’t trust anybody.’ ”

Michael Dubin, a member of the board of directors of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, is taking Ratkovich’s warnings to heart.

“The current fiasco at Wilshire and Western is an example of what should not happen in Hollywood,” said Dubin, a real estate developer who authored the chamber’s response to the RCC’s request for public feedback.

“There’s a lot of ifs,” he said. “The question is, does the RCC have the ability and the desire to try to fully mitigate the problems they’re going to create? I think they have the ability. I question whether they have the desire and the commitment to the community.”

He pointed to the document’s failure to provide for any recourse if the project fails to follow its own mitigation guidelines, and to the lack of a budget for measures such as advertising to promote threatened businesses.

“We anticipate the next version of the document will be more thorough,” Saldana responded. Although the period for public input expired this week, he said that submissions will be accepted beyond the deadline.

“Maybe this document is not exactly what people want,” he said. “That’s fine. That’s why we’re taking people’s input.”