Anger Surfaces Over Red Line Tunnel Plan

Hundreds of property owners in the hills above Hollywood and Studio City are pondering a dirty question these days: Just what is the earth 800 feet below their land worth?

$1,000? $250,000? $5.5 million? Zip?

This strange and difficult conundrum has provoked strenuous debate from the Santa Monica Mountains to City Hall as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority goes full-speed ahead with its plan to dig and blast twin Red Line subway tunnels from Universal City to Hollywood.

Critics of the plan, including the city parks department, complain that the MTA has handed property owners an unfair ultimatum: Accept $1,000 for the right to burrow beneath their land, or face condemnation. Landowners believe the easement’s true value could be 10, 100, or in the park department’s case, 5,500 times higher.

The MTA contends that the subterranean easement--the right to a tubed-shaped space 2.3 miles long and about 125 feet wide--is worthless to anyone but the agency. Officials insist that the hard-rock mining will occur so far underground--more than the height of a 40-story building over most of the route--that sound and vibrations will be barely perceptible on the surface.

The dispute will be played out in hushed bureaucratic tones at an MTA board meeting in December, when directors are expected to condemn easements the agency has not yet purchased. That will force holdout property owners to battle the MTA in court over the dirt’s value.

But along the narrow, winding streets of the exclusive Santa Monica Mountains community above the tunnel alignment, the debate is streaked with emotion. Many homeowners fear the tunneling will bore a gaping hole through their property values and upset the tranquillity of their hills. So they are gathering to plot strategy, curse the subway and rally their spirits.

“No one can compensate you for the loss of your peace of mind,” said Patricia Johnston, a film-distribution executive whose living room window opens to a million-dollar view of the San Fernando Valley off Multiview Drive.

Johnston is among the hundreds of hillside property owners who have so far been invisible to the MTA because their land does not sit directly over the tunnel route. Frustrated and angry, they complain that the agency has neither alerted them to potential impacts on their property nor offered them compensation.

“The MTA has treated us all horrendously,” said Karin Gideon, who lives over the alignment and has been a leader in pushing the agency to boost its offer. The wife of Oscar-nominated screenwriter-producer Raynold Gideon, she has hiked many miles in the hills to urge neighbors to attend impromptu homeowner meetings led by state Sen. Tom Hayden, (D-Santa Monica), a subway opponent.

Along with fears of plunging real-estate values, residents worry about the tunnel project’s safety. The MTA plans to use 250,000 pounds of explosives over a 12- to 16-month period to blast five huge underground equipment rooms, an extra-wide track section where the tunnels pass through an earthquake fault, and 18 diagonal passages where trains will be able to cross between the two tunnels. Explosions are scheduled 15 hours a day.

The MTA’s tunneling contractor has sought state permission to store 10,000 pounds of explosives at a time in the tunnel--a week’s supply, rather than the usual three-day cache. The MTA contends that this is a safer alternative to trucking explosives through city streets more often. But some residents fret anyway, expressing a waning confidence in the transit agency.

“The MTA has had explosions in their tunnel even when they haven’t used dynamite,” scoffed a cynical Mulholland Drive resident, Allen Rose.

Not all residents sympathize with their neighbors’ fears. Many believe property values could actually rise with the easy access to the subway station.

“The problem in California is that with any public project, people form a group to stop it. They are strangling progress,” said Tom Lay, a film industry artist who lives on Multiview Drive. “We need rapid transit.”

Likewise, motion picture cameraman Al Leavitt said the hand-wringing is “unfounded” because he believes the rocky spine of the mountain will absorb the shock waves of tunneling and blasting.

“I’m tired of people looking for a cause that doesn’t exist,” he said. “They’re putting a little hole in a very large mountain. Hey, get a life, guys.”

Still, for others, the dispute sifts down to a concept that lawyers call “severance damages.” Property owners commonly hold title to their land to the center of the Earth. The subterranean ribbon of dirt that the MTA wishes to purchase clearly has no market value, but what happens when the cylinder is severed from the property and used to construct a subway?

“The MTA has constructed its tunnels so poorly so far that there is a stigma attached to a property on top of a Metro Rail easement--that’s the real damage,” said Kevin Brogan, an attorney representing a dozen homeowners facing condemnation.

“If you survey home buyers and ask how much they’ll pay for a house over a tunnel--and if not full price, how much of a discount do they want--I’ll bet the amount is not $1,000.”

Brogan estimates that severance damages could work out to as much as 25% of a property’s full value.

MTA Real Estate Director Velma Marshall objects to that view, declaring that agency appraisers have determined that the tunnel will not impair property values. The MTA would prefer to compensate property owners for any actual damage rather than paying in advance for possible damage.

“That’s the basis of our disagreement,” Marshall said, adding that condemnation hearings will ultimately decide who is right.

Brogan, however, asserts that California eminent domain law requires public agencies to appraise the full value of properties it plans to condemn, not just the easement itself. If the MTA had done so, he said, it would not have offered a flat $1,000 to all property owners regardless of whether they own a $200,000 bungalow or a $4-million mansion.

Mayor Richard Riordan has joined critics of the condemnation, urging in a letter to the MTA board’s chairman last week that the panel hold off any eminent domain action until it reviews a report from three engineering experts on whether the agency should be tunneling in Los Angeles at all. The report, ordered by the mayor in August, is due Friday.

Along with the mayor, hillside property owners have a second powerful ally: the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.

Department staff have belittled the MTA offer of $1,000 for an easement under city-owned Runyon Canyon Park as a “slap in the face.” Park commissioners have demanded in closed-door negotiations that the MTA compensate for potential damage to the historic park’s ecology by purchasing 110 acres of nearby open space from three private landowners--then turn it over to the city for parkland.

The land has been estimated to be worth $4.5 million to $5.5 million. The largest parcel is owned by Alex Trebek of the TV game show “Jeopardy!”, who originally wanted to build homes there. Another parcel is a 4.8-acre estate surrounded by Runyon Canyon Park that has long been sought by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy for a ranger station.

“We just want it, we don’t care what it costs,” said Al Carmichael, planning officer at the parks department.

The reason: An independent analysis prepared for the parks department by the conservancy determined that MTA tunneling “presents an enormous gamble to the integrity of the mountains” because miners will be forced to pump out up to 7 million gallons of water a day for years, a process called “dewatering.” The report predicted that the lack of water could leave the hills barren and drive away wildlife.

The 110 acres would amount to an insurance policy, guaranteeing that the public would have a new place to hike in chaparral-covered hillsides where the watershed is permanently protected.

The MTA’s Marshall said she hopes to come to an “amicable agreement” with the department but believes that the demand for the land purchase is “extreme.” In a letter to department General Manager Jackie Tatum, the MTA declared that its experts believe the tunnels will not affect natural water flow in the park.

“There is nothing we know that substantiates their fear,” Marshall said. “Their position is based on pure speculation.”

Steven L. Soboroff, president of the city parks commission, said he would vote against granting the easement if the MTA refuses to purchase the open space.

“I don’t think our position was extreme enough,” he argued. “This is an important environmental issue with a lot of good-faith ramifications for the entire Metro Rail project.”

As the two negotiate, the clock continues to count down toward the unspecified date in late February when the MTA has said it must begin tunneling. Until last week, the agency said it would start in January, but the launch has been pushed back due to delays in overhauling the tunnel-boring machines after their work on a previous job.

Still, the MTA might well prefer to conclude its condemnation disputes out of court. In constructing its first Red Line segment Downtown, the agency lost 33 of 38 condemnation cases with property owners and their tenants in pretrial settlements and jury trials. It was forced to pay nearly three times the value of its combined original offers.

In the case of a dispute over the condemnation of a parking lot at the southwest corner of 5th and Hill streets, for instance, a jury ordered the MTA to pay $17 million to a property owner to whom the agency had originally offered $2.5 million. A judge ultimately reduced the amount to $11 million.

Brogan, the condemnation attorney, said that the amount included $2.6 million for severance damages and $2.4 million in interest and attorney fees mandated by the court after a finding that the MTA had been “unreasonable” in its pretrial settlement offer.

In all, the MTA was ordered in condemnation hearings to pay $24.4 million more to property owners and their tenants than it had originally offered in the first segment--the only subway section for which all condemnation hearings have been settled.

So far the MTA has obtained just 22 of the 94 subsurface easements it requires to tunnel through the Santa Monica Mountains.

One of the sellers, Anne Woodruff, an 83-year-old retired nurse, said Multiview Drive was a dirt road when she and her husband, an aerospace worker, built their home in 1950. They owned a Hupmobile then, but she fondly recalls the city’s early public-transportation system, regretting the day officials “tore out the Red Cars and threw them away.”

Standing on her balcony overlooking the east San Fernando Valley, she can look straight down the hill at a big hole where the new Red Line tunnel will ramp up out of the ground at Universal City.

“I didn’t feel I had the money to fight it, so I might as well take their money,” she said. “I figure it will take so long, I won’t be around to have to see it.”

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Cross-Mountain Subway

By late February, two tunnel boring machines will be assembled in a vast hole next to the Hollywood Freeway at Lankershim Boulevard and ready for their mission: A 2.3 mile excavation from Universal City to Hollywood that will ultimately carry Red Line subway trains. The MTA has purchased the rights to tunnel under 22 properties that lie directly above tunnel route at a price of mostly $1,000 to $2,000. But 72 more property owners have rebuffed the agency, demanding more money and assurances of speedy compensation in the event of ground settlement. One holdout: The city parks department, which demanded that the MTA compensate the city for dynamiting space for huge equipment rooms under Runyon Canyon Park by buying 110 acres of adjacent private open space.

The Tunnels: Two 23-ft., six-in. concrete tubes run parallel, 77 feet apart.

Horizontal: Vertical ratio = 5:2