MTA Loan Plan Would Cover Subway Tunneling Damage

At a meeting that began with conciliatory moves and ended in insults, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board on Wednesday approved the creation of a loan program and rapid-response teams to assist owners of properties damaged by subway tunneling--as long as they promise not to sue the agency.

The proposal was angrily rejected by several property owners who have joined in filing $2 billion in legal claims against the MTA over damage along Hollywood and Lankershim boulevards.

In the plan to deal quickly with sinking or cracking buildings along subway tunneling routes, MTA chief executive Joseph E. Drew offered to authorize payment of repair bills, mortgage installments or emergency hotel bills as soon as 72 hours after a claim is made.

He said he would put aside $2 million in next year’s budget to pay for the program, which would also establish field teams made up of a representative from the tunneling contractor, an independent claims adjuster and staff members from the MTA’s construction, public affairs, risk management, budget and legal departments.

The catch: Drew said that MTA lawyers told him not to make the aid available to those who had filed lawsuits against the agency.

“I am perfectly willing for anyone to withdraw from their lawsuit and come into the claims environment and we will work with them,” he said.

The homeowners opposing the plan complained that the program amounts to little more than rhetoric and called it an assault on their constitutional rights to seek redress for ruined businesses and lives.

“To tell people that they should get rid of their lawyers to get money from you is absolutely unconscionable,” Gerald Schneiderman, a major Hollywood Boulevard property owner who has coordinated 1,400 lawsuits against the MTA, told the board.

Schneiderman claims that the $2 million budgeted will be spent on new MTA consultants, staffing and equipment rather than on assistance to property owners.

In an interview, county supervisor and MTA board member Mike Antonovich agreed with Schneiderman, saying he was “appalled” by Drew’s decision to turn away property owners who have sued the agency.