MTA Settles Lawsuit With Tunneling Foes

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said Wednesday that they had settled out of court a lawsuit filed by subway opponents who had sought to block tunneling under the Hollywood Hills.

The agreement calls for the MTA to curtail the use of explosives detonated under Runyon Canyon and eliminate all blasting under the rest of the Hollywood Hills. The settlement also requires construction crews to scale back plans to drain more than 3.5 million gallons of water from the ground.

Both sides will also select a “qualified tunneling expert” to monitor the operation and issue quarterly reports on its progress.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member, said the agreement would add $5 million in costs to the $1.3-billion project and extend the completion date by two to three months.

Two organizations, Rescue Our Canyons and Friends of Runyon Canyon, had contended that the water draining and the digging 200 to 970 feet below Runyon Canyon Park, once a retreat for swashbuckling film star Errol Flynn, would destroy a wildlife habitat and ruin the park.

In their lawsuit, the organizations argued that the MTA and its chief funding partner, the U.S. Department of Transportation, had run afoul of a federal law that prohibits using park lands for transit projects unless “all possible measures to mitigate harm to the land have been adopted.”

In the settlement, the parties agreed that compliance with its conditions will also satisfy federal environmental requirements.

On its surface, the accord is a carbon copy of a motion the MTA board approved in January. But the settlement, which will be adapted into a court consent decree, will now have the force of law.

“It’s a huge difference because the motion could have been amended at any time,” said attorney Jan Chatten-Brown, who filed the lawsuit for the environmental organizations. “There was no mechanism to assure what was being done underground is what was required by the motion.”

That motion, by Yaroslavsky, also ordered work crews to cut in half the number of detonations needed for the project and limit the hours when they use explosives to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, instead of 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. six days a week.

Yaroslavsky called the settlement “a major breakthrough in our efforts to sweep aside the legal impediments to completing our subway system as safely and expeditiously as possible.”

Another MTA board member, Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, said “the MTA finally came to its senses. However, it is a shame that thousands of tax dollars were wasted and a lawsuit was necessary to convince the district to do the right thing.”

The MTA board also approved a motion by Mayor Richard J. Riordan to siphon any extra eligible MTA revenues to bus system improvements. The motion does not specify how that money would be spent. Bus riders said the $10.4 million in the MTA budget reserved for bus system improvement falls short of the amount needed.