Metro Rail in Valley May Lose Funding Priority

The San Fernando Valley portion of the Metro Rail mass transit line is likely to be bumped off a state funding priority list next week, threatening to delay the start of construction beyond 2003, transportation officials said Friday.

A hot debate is expected at a Metropolitan Transportation Authority meeting Wednesday when supporters of the Valley line fight to keep the project on the list. But supporters fear they may lose that battle to backers of other projects vying for the same money.

“It’s a major setback,” said county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who is a member of the MTA.

“This could sound the death knell for the Valley rail.”

Yaroslavsky and others said the latest threat to the project is partly due to years of squabbling among Valley residents and lawmakers over the route and design of the line, repeatedly delaying key decisions.

“We helped this happen,” said City Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents the northeast Valley and sits as an alternative member on the MTA.

An MTA planning panel recommended Thursday against putting the Valley line on a funding list that state transportation officials will adopt next month. The state requires that the list, known as the State Transportation Improvement Program, include only projects that can be built in the next seven years.

In its place, the panel recommended seeking $500 million for Metro rail lines to Pasadena and East Los Angeles and an access route to the proposed Marina del Rey studio of DreamWorks SKG, formed by media giants Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

Construction for these substitute projects is scheduled to begin in seven years because state transportation officials have warned that if the MTA recommends a project that cannot be built in seven years, the MTA may forfeit the $500 million.

But supporters of the Valley project, including Bernson, Yaroslavsky and Mayor Richard Riordan, worry that once it is off the state list, other projects will move ahead to knock the Valley line even further behind schedule. They also worry that the state will have less money to spend on transportation in the future.

Riordan--who controls four votes on the MTA--said he will work with MTA staff to try to keep the Valley on the priority list.

“Basically, we will put that into the hopper next week to see if we want to change the priorities,” he said.

The Valley line is expected to run partly below ground and partly at grade, from North Hollywood to Woodland Hills, along a path parallel to Burbank and Chandler boulevards.

But design studies for the line were delayed in 1990 when MTA officials began studying an alternative--a monorail line along the median of the Ventura Freeway from Universal City to Woodland Hills--proposed by county Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

The debate over the two proposals split the Valley into feuding factions until the MTA reaffirmed its support for the so-called Burbank-Chandler route last year.

Under the MTA’s 20-year plan, construction of the Valley line was to have begun in 2003, with completion expected in 2010. The state had been expected to provide about $500 million for the $1.1-billion line, with the balance to be paid by the MTA and the federal government.

David Meiger, a project manager for the Valley line, said the MTA cannot move up the scheduled construction start date of the Valley line without finding new money to pay for the MTA’s share of the project. He said the Valley project can move ahead, however, if the MTA bumps another project back a few years.

He agreed that the project may have been closer to completion if it were not for the four-year delay to study the monorail option.

“The years that we spent debating were the years we could have spent finding funding to build it,” he said.

Meiger adds, however, that if the Valley line is dropped from the state priority funding list, it can be returned when the list is revised in 1998, without delaying construction beyond the original plans.

But that doesn’t mollify supporters of the project, who said the membership of the MTA will probably change by 1998 and new members may not be committed to giving the Valley a rail line that has been promised for years.

“Between now and 1998, a lot of things can happen,” Yaroslavsky said.

Privately, some MTA insiders blame Riordan for the Valley line’s latest troubles, saying he failed to use his influence to make sure the Valley line remained a top priority.

Riordan concedes that he was caught by surprise by the planning committee’s decision. But he blames the MTA staff for failing to warn him about the troubles with the Valley line.

“Staff should be doing a better job of briefing us,” he said. “This came as a shock to me.”