MTA’s Delay of Subway Shaft Comes Under Federal Scrutiny

Renewing a battle that hillside homeowners thought was won, federal officials are expected to ask the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in a closed-door hearing today to defend its decision to delay for 20 years the construction of an 850-foot-deep subway ventilation shaft in the Hollywood Hills.

The demand will come during the Federal Transit Administration’s regular quarterly meeting with the MTA in Los Angeles, federal officials said.

The MTA listed the ventilation shaft in its original environmental impact report as an essential element in its plan to bore twin subway tunnels 2.3 miles through the Hollywood Hills from Studio City to Sunset Boulevard.

The MTA said at the time that the shaft was needed to keep too much air pressure from building up in the tunnel, which would slow down trains speeding over the longest nonstop stretch of track in the Metro Rail system.

Officials said the shaft was also needed as a potential escape hatch and entry point for rescuers in an emergency.

Local homeowners, however, strongly objected to the plan--contending that construction workers would have to blast out earth for more than two years to build the 22-foot-wide shaft and send 20 to 40 truckloads of dirt a day down narrow, winding Mulholland Drive.

Residents of the Hollywood Hills also objected on aesthetic grounds because plans called for the shaft to rise to a two-story concrete bunker just a few yards from the northwestern boundary of popular Runyon Canyon Park, near Mulholland Drive. Ecologists at the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy contended that construction of the shaft could drain millions of gallons of ground water from the park, killing trees and plants, potentially leaving it barren.

Late last summer, City Council President John Ferraro persuaded the MTA to drastically modify its plans. In a letter to homeowners, he said the agency would instead dig a horizontal ventilation shaft that would surface innocuously at a city maintenance yard in the Cahuenga Pass.

Not long after that, on Aug. 30, the MTA quietly announced that it had decided to put off building any vent shaft, vertical or horizontal, until at least 2015.

As far as residents of the area were concerned, the ventilation shaft issue died on Oct. 18, when MTA board member Zev Yaroslavsky wrote a letter to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy announcing that it “will not be needed for at least 20 years.”

Yaroslavsky said MTA staff members had determined that under reduced estimates of the number of people who will ride the subway, “there will never be more than one train in the tunnel.”

The FTA’s problem, according to the federal official who declined to be named, is that the deferral was never voted upon by the MTA board of directors or officially lodged in the public record.

The official also said the MTA has provided the federal government with two contradictory sets of paperwork for the shaft, one saying construction will be canceled, the other that it will be deferred.

“We will ask for a representation as to which document is factual,” the official said.

The FTA has provided nearly half the money for the MTA’s Red Line subway project. Two years ago, the federal agency temporarily cut off $1.6 billion in subway funding because of its dissatisfaction with the MTA’s management of construction.

John Walsh, a veteran subway activist, believes that the federal government is really after the money committed to the shaft. “They’ll say, if you want to delete this, you have to lower the budget $30 million and return half to us,” he said.

Two boring machines will begin digging the subway tunnel through the Santa Monica Mountains in early April.

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State Sen. Tom Hayden said local subway critics will protest the tunnel construction plans outside MTA headquarters at 9:30 a.m. today. Hayden, a longtime opponent of the subway, said he unsuccessfully urged federal officials to open their meeting to the public.

“We want to know whether Runyon Canyon is getting the shaft behind closed doors,” he said.

Charles Stark, MTA subway construction manager, said on Monday the shaft was still “definitely deferred.”

He said the meeting today with federal officials would center on whether the MTA could still meet ridership goals while allowing only one train at a time in the cross-mountain tunnel.

It will, Stark said. “The FTA wants to make sure that the system we build is the one we said we were going to build,” Stark said. “Deferral of the shaft does reduce our capacity, but not below a level of ridership that was committed to in our original documents.”