Fast-Response Team Sought by MTA Chief

Stung by community outrage over sinking buildings along a North Hollywood street where subway tunnels are being dug, the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said Friday he is creating a team of trouble-shooters to respond swiftly to such crises with repairs and cash.

Joseph A. Drew said that if the MTA board approves, the team of specialists in engineering, construction, law, insurance and public affairs would report directly to him. Its members would have broad powers to make repairs and secure immediate payments for owners of damaged property along MTA construction routes, he said.

“I want a leadership program in place that will make big and small decisions instantly to prevent problems from getting out of control,” he said.

Speaking of the organization’s slow response in mid-March to the owner of El Sombrero, a popular nightclub on Lankershim Boulevard shut down by city building inspectors after its floor sank 15 inches in the wake of subway tunneling 60 feet below, he added:

“If a business is yellow-tagged, I would never again want to wait three to four weeks to decide on a course of action.”

MTA board member and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky hailed the proposal as an indication that the MTA is turning over a new leaf in its treatment of the public, calling it a “whole new approach” that will replace bureaucratic obstinacy with compassion.

“In the past, we have just let people hang, let our attorneys handle them, string them out and hope they go away,” Yaroslavsky said. “That has to stop.”

Yaroslavsky said that he has been prompting Drew to bring such a plan to the board for approval for a month and predicted it would sail through.

Drew said he would soon ask the board for approval to create the “problem-solving action teams” composed of employees with all needed areas of expertise. “Having the right people look at problems quickly will result in immediate decision making,” he said.

Drew said the size of the problem would dictate the team’s authority, and that he could envision such a team declaring a problem so serious that he might call a special session of the agency’s board of directors to deal with it immediately at the highest level.

“I am willing to be inconvenienced myself before I’m willing to let the people on Lankershim Boulevard be inconvenienced,” he said.

Although the problem-solving team has yet to be finalized, the mission already appears to have had a result:

Yaroslavsky said the MTA on Saturday would grant $5,000 to El Sombrero owner Isabel Lopez to help her pay bills until the authority repairs the building at a cost that could range from $20,000 to $100,000.

Noting that the transportation agency has not yet determined whether subway tunneling is at fault for the damage, he said:

“You can always go after people who are at fault later, but you need to keep people in business while the dickering is going back and forth.”

The MTA has not yet determined how much money it would set aside for payment to business people and property owners. Yaroslavsky observed, however, that $16 million that has been budgeted for construction mitigation in Hollywood might be better spent on helping businesses there right now than on landscaping later.

Neither have serious issues of liability been worked out, Yaroslavsky said, because it presents a complex puzzle to the authority’s lawyers.

Officials at the transportation agency have expressed regret and embarrassment over news reports of the last two weeks of damage to more than a dozen businesses and properties along the Lankershim Boulevard route of the Metro Rail Red Line.

Several businesses, from a car dealership to a Cajun restaurant, have closed their doors because of the damage, ranging from cracked floors to broken water mains or construction equipment blocking customer access.

On Thursday, a civil engineering expert appointed by Mayor Riordan to review MTA methods publicly blasted the MTA for excavating two tunnels in North Hollywood with what he called out-of-date digging machines.

The expert, professor Dan Eisenstein of the University of Alberta, said the type of machines chosen are seldom used anywhere in the world in the type of loose, sandy soil found in the San Fernando Valley.

He said the $2.5-million machines, known as open-face shields, do not allow operators enough control over loose soil at the tunnel face. Over a period of a few days to a few months, dirt that is supporting buildings above the tunnel slips into voids created by such machines, he said.

That can cause concrete slabs to sink, walls to crack and roofs to buckle, he said, although he did not specifically attribute the problems on Lankershim to the MTA tunneling--an issue still unresolved.

The cure is almost as bad for a business district: very expensive hardening of the ground in front of the tunnel-boring machine with the loud, messy injection of chemical grout. The machines block traffic for months at a time and create choking clouds of fine white dust.

MTA board member James Cragin said that news of damage to buildings along Lankershim Boulevard has shocked some of his colleagues who believed that such problems had ended after the uproar over sinkages along the subway construction route in Hollywood in 1994 and 1995.

“We thought that after Hollywood Boulevard, the authority’s staff and construction managers would look around and say, ‘Let’s not do that again.’ So we were truly surprised when it has happened again,” Cragin said.

“It bothers us. We’re not callous. As elected officials, we’re close enough to our constituents that if a foundation slips on them, it slips on our feet too, and we don’t like that.”

The proposal was praised as a wise move by Gerald Schneiderman, chairman of Hollywood Damage Control and Recovery Inc., which has filed $2 billion in lawsuits against the MTA on behalf of 1,400 construction-damage plaintiffs in Hollywood and North Hollywood.

“It’s smart to cut your exposure to damage at $50,000, rather than wait till a business closes and face exposure to $200,000 in losses in court,” Schneiderman said.

The program would be welcomed by people like Renee Cronenwalt, co-owner of 256 feet of storefronts in the 4800 block of Lankershim Boulevard.

Cronenwalt said she has seen her retirement income drop in half in the past six months as tenants have left her buildings. Street blockages caused by MTA construction crews, she said, have drained the street of customers; cracks in walls and doors that won’t swing open have prevented her from releasing their vacant spaces.

The coup de grace, she said: MTA insurance adjusters who insinuated that cracks and wall separations were caused by the Northridge earthquake more than two years ago, then declined to state how they could help.

“They said they’d get right back to us,” Cronenwalt said. “That was two weeks ago.”