Critics Charge Metro Rail ‘Bait and Switch’ : Transit: Planners seem to favor the commonly used ‘cut-and-cover’ method to build stations, instead of the mining excavations they had promised.

Half a year after transportation commissioners announced their decision to use a novel way to build the Metro Rail station at Highland Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, planners now say they expect to use a faster and cheaper method dreaded by many local business people.

The change from mining, which is said to be less disruptive to traffic, to cut and cover, which Metro Rail has been using all along, is being called a bait-and-switch tactic. It raises the prospect that Hollywood Boulevard will be ruined as a tourist attraction for two years or more, opponents said.

Appalled at the news, they pointed to Metro Rail work under way at Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue, where stores are hard to see and pedestrians are hard-pressed to cross the street as traffic zooms along a yard-high elevated plank way.

“It’ll just be a disaster,” said Michael Dubin, vice president of the Kornwasser & Friedman development firm, which recently opened a movie, restaurant and shopping complex just west of the Highland Avenue station site.

“A mined station was an effort to put the best foot forward. Now they flip-flopped, in secret almost,” he said of the Rail Construction Corp., a subsidiary of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. The prospective change was unintentionally revealed in minutes from a low-level meeting between Metro Rail officials and representatives of local utilities. Ed McSpedon, president of the rail corporation, then met with Chamber of Commerce representatives Oct. 30.

The commission is still on record as favoring mining, McSpedon said. But as time goes on, other alternatives--especially a kinder, gentler, version of the techniques used at Wilshire-Western and downtown--are looking more attractive.

“We’re not entirely sure, but some opportunities have arisen which may allow us to do the construction with less impact, and to schedule improvements to get us through the construction sooner,” he said in an interview.

One of those opportunities was a bit of serendipity from the recent failure to secure public financing for an entertainment complex the Melvin Simon development firm wants to build on property around the Chinese Theater.

The bad news for the Simon project could mean that land would be available for staging sites for trucks and other heavy equipment. This would make it easier to excavate the Highland station from the surface and cover it over with less disruption than elsewhere along the Metro Rail route.

“At this point, no decision has been made, but we are going to do something at least as good as the mining commitment that has already been made and maybe better,” McSpedon said.

The issue may come up at a Transportation Commission meeting scheduled for December, he said.

If they were to mine the station, workers would dig out the site using entrance shafts away from the busy intersection of Hollywood and Highland, a major route of traffic bound for the Hollywood Freeway (101).

Using cut and cover, they would dig up the street and lay yard-high steel beams to support wood planking. Along Wilshire, the beams were placed above ground level to avoid having to reroute utility lines. But in Hollywood, they would be slung below ground to allow for a flat roadway, Metro Rail spokesman Gilbert Saldana said, so traffic would remain at street level. An unavoidable side-effect of both techniques would be hundreds of truck trips and high noise levels during the subway builders’ working hours--late night and early morning.

Michael Marr, Simon’s vice president for development, confirmed that talks have begun with Metro Rail officials, but he said it was too early to give any details.

“It seems less costly and easier just cutting the ditch and scooping and moving the dirt rather than having two entrance points at each end,” he said.

Mining has only been used once on subway projects in this country, at a recently opened station of the Metro in Washington.

Although it has been used extensively in Europe, McSpedon said, it would probably take longer and be more expensive unless American engineers and work crews get more experience.

Mining could also cause the earth to settle unpredictably and cause some building damage, he said.

The $23 million or so saved from the switch to cut and cover could be used to find ways to soften the blow of construction in all of Hollywood, McSpedon said. Other stations are planned for the corners of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street and Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue.

Anxiety rides high in Hollywood, however.

“The community is concerned that this a bait-and-switch tactic,” said Willie Fleet, publisher of the Los Angeles Independent Newspapers and senior vice chair of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

“You can call it enhanced cut and cover, but it’s still going to cause a lot of problems to the businesses along there,” Fleet said, urging that Metro Rail find the money to stick with the mining option.

Norton Halper, a member of an elected advisory committee established and later renounced by City Councilman Michael Woo, noted that an earlier environmental impact report included an option of reverting to cut and cover.

“The opposition was reduced from the business community because in large print it said ‘mining’,” he said. “If this change was known back then, they’d have had a lot more opposition.”

McSpedon, however, said, “People shouldn’t get too excited about one individual piece of a program. That’s what happens when pieces of information are taken out of context.”

Conspiracy theories, he said, are “very Machiavellian, but simply not true. We work for the taxpayers here. We’re not a developer trying to foist some scheme on the public. If they’re not satisfied, we don’t do it.”

Some business people have called for rent subsidies to help them through hard times. Among them is restaurateur Doreet Hakman, who spoke at a public meeting to discuss the impact of the Highland station.

“If you’re not willing to have subsidies or pay my rent to the landlord, there’s no point playing Mickey Mouse games,” said Hakman, who operates the Snow White cafe.

Although those kinds of aid appear unlikely, McSpedon said loans may be available to help out until business picks up when the trains start whooshing underneath Hollywood sometime near the end of the millennium. The target date opening service from Hollywood to downtown is 1988.

“Although there is some short-term pain, the long-term prospect is positive for people who own property near stations,” McSpedon said. “But the short-term pain can’t be dismissed. The question is how we can help them.”

Because of the extra business expected when the trains start running, he said, “those feeling the most severe impacts will also reap the greatest benefit.”

That argument was lost, at least for now, on one veteran of the Metro Rail wars.

Clare DeBriere, project manager for the Wiltern Center, an office and entertainment complex at Wilshire and Western, spoke resentfully of the scene outside her doors: “It makes for a really great walking environment and it makes it really easy to see the storefronts.”

Is she bitter?

“Sweetheart, if you lost virtually all the tenants and got daily complaints you’d be bitter too,” she said. “Although it will be a fabulous benefit in the long run, it’s doing absolutely nothing for us now.”