Alternative Offered to Link MCA, Metro Rail : Transit: The plan would preserve the Lankershim site for a subway station, but would include access to Universal Studios.

City transit officials have proposed a compromise for the Universal City Metro Rail station that would preserve the planned Lankershim Boulevard site but better serve the MCA entertainment complex, potentially satisfying key demands by both the multimedia company and county transportation planners.

MCA has pushed hard to relocate the subway station to the doorstep of its Universal Studios and CityWalk complex--a proposal resisted by county transportation planners as too costly and time-consuming.

But city analysts now say in a report that the new Red Line station could remain on Lankershim but should include an entrance on the Universal Studios lot up the hill, with some kind of shuttle service between the portal and the station proper. Access to the entertainment center would therefore improve without the added delays and costs of moving the station directly onto the Universal Studios lot, as MCA has lobbied for.

Both MCA executives and officials of the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority said Wednesday that the proposal appears workable, fueling hope that the long-running disagreement between MCA and the transit agency over station location could be near an end.

“We are taking a very hard look at it. It looks very doable,” transit authority analyst Judith Wilson said of the report issue last week.

“We feel this is probably an 80-to-90% solution,” MCA spokeswoman Christine Hanson said.

“It’s not perfect--there are still problems that need to be worked out,” MCA Development President Larry Spungin said. “But it’s a way to get beyond” the issues that have bedeviled talks between MCA and the transportation authority.

Over the past few months, MCA has recommended moving the station to its property half a mile southeast of the Lankershim site, underneath the Hollywood Freeway near Cahuenga Boulevard. The entertainment giant contends that ridership of people headed to Universal Studios and the company’s CityWalk attraction would increase.

But county transit officials estimated that such a change would carry a $41-million price tag and postpone the station’s scheduled July, 2000, opening by nearly two years.

Most of the added costs and time would spring from having to buy new land and realign tunnels extending the Red Line from Hollywood to Universal City through the Cahuenga Pass. The city compromise plan, by keeping the original site, would eliminate that need.

The blueprint calls for the subway station to empty onto the east as well as west side of Lankershim so that passengers can hop onto a shuttle system--perhaps a monorail--up to Universal Studios. Such a system could cost up to $20 million, said James M. Okazaki, chief of city transit programs and author of the compromise, but MCA would be expected to help defray the costs.

The plan also suggests roadway improvements around Lankershim that would help relieve heavy congestion in the area and improve car access to the Hollywood Freeway and the Universal Studios lot.

Wilson said her office has already incorporated most of the traffic proposals into the current project and that the improvements can be made within its budget.

She said her staff is working hard to develop a recommendation on the compromise plan as quickly as possible to avoid further delaying construction, which was to have begun last week.

Transit officials voted to give MCA until March to come up with a funding plan for moving the station onto its lot--a delay that would cost the cash-strapped transportation authority $500,000. MCA executives told the authority last week that federal funds might be available, but county officials insisted that such funds not be sought if they were originally earmarked for earthquake relief.

Okazaki said the city transportation department decided to step into the fray and offer an alternative plan when it saw that the impasse between MCA and the county agency continued to drag on.

“There was a debate going on, and I just wanted to offer it . . . (as) a compromise between the two superpowers, the MCA and the MTA,” Okazaki said.