Activists Demand Eastside Subway

A group of merchants and residents offered Wednesday to do what the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been unable to do--begin digging a subway tunnel to Los Angeles’ Eastside.

Standing in front of an empty lot cleared for a subway station that may never be built, the community activists brought shovels--not really to dig--but to symbolically throw dirt on the MTA for retreating from its promise to extend Metro Rail to the transit-dependent neighborhood.

Joined by influential Eastside Councilman and MTA board member Richard Alatorre, the group rejected improved bus service as a substitute for a subway and vowed to fight back to get the rail project moving.

“We’re sick and tired of being led to the altar and left standing there,” said Ross Valencia, the president of the Boyle Heights Resident Homeowners Assn., standing under a banner reading, “MTA Broken Promises.”

One woman shouted, “We’re ready to dig the hole!”

Despite spending more than $100 million on the project, the MTA in January called off construction of the $1-billion, 3.5-mile extension from Union Station to Boyle Heights because of funding problems. Officials have promised to study other ways to improve mass transit to the Eastside and other neighborhoods, such as building busways.

But the activists from Little Tokyo, the artists’ loft district and Boyle Heights rejected a busway as unfeasible on their neighborhoods’ narrow streets.

As the Eastside activists sought to resurrect their line, supporters of the light-rail line between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena were making headway in their fight to get their particular project back on track. A so-called rescue bill by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), to create the Pasadena Metro Blue Line Construction Authority to take over the stalled project from the MTA, was approved by the state Senate and sent to the Assembly. Supporters have yet to say how they would close a $100-million to $250-million shortfall in the project’s $804-million budget.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen activists gathered for the news conference at Cesar Chavez and Soto streets, where businesses and homes were demolished to make way for a subway station. Some of the activists have worked for years to secure a federal commitment to help fund the subway that transit officials said would bring business to the area and “bring communities together.”

Joe Coria, president of the citizens advisory committee for the subway project, complained that Eastside residents have helped to fund transit projects in other neighborhoods through the county’s penny-on-the-dollar transit tax. “We’ve been told, ‘Sorry, East L.A., there is no more money left. We’ll give you some buses and go away,’ ” Coria said. “That is not good enough. We are not going away.”

The gathering marked the beginning of a divisive campaign over a proposed ballot measure to prohibit spending of the county’s transit tax for any subway tunneling beyond the segment under construction to North Hollywood.

As the Eastside activists gathered, petitions to qualify the anti-subway measure for the November ballot piled up in the downtown office of the “Citizens to Reform the MTA,” a group headed by county supervisor and MTA board member Zev Yaroslavsky.

Laura Pizana, a mother of three who was displaced from her home to make way for the Eastside subway, offered this message to Yaroslavsky: “If you ever decide to run for mayor, you’re not going to get the vote of the Latino population.”

Alatorre complained that subway critics have “divided this city.”

“We’re the ones who created, off of our backs, our sweat and our toil, a public transportation system,” Alatorre said. “But then when it is our turn to get a decent transportation system here in this community, then they say that we can’t afford it.”

Reached later for comment, Yaroslavsky said that he understands the frustration, but that a $300-million-per-mile subway is no longer affordable. “Nobody wins if we’ve spent all of our discretionary dollars on one three-mile stub of underground,” he said.

Alatorre threatened to give his MTA board colleagues a “headache” to get the Eastside subway back on track, and vowed that Mayor Richard Riordan, the MTA board chairman, “will get educated, I assure you.”

The councilman complained that the MTA is taking too conservative an approach in its budgeting.