Backers of Valley Subway Watch Their Hopes Sink

Prospects for a trans-Valley subway, uncertain in the best of times, look even worse to some of the proposed project’s supporters now that Mayor Richard Riordan has signaled a shift toward above-ground rail lines.

With support diminishing for subway construction in Los Angeles, transportation planners may be forced back to the drawing board to bring mass transit across the floor of the San Fernando Valley, officials and homeowners said Thursday.

“We may get left out,” said Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. “We will get an entryway to the [subway] system in North Hollywood, but the whole rest of the Valley needs Riordan . . . to fight for our fair share.”

Valley homeowners have watched their hopes for a subway sink steadily since 1994, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority handed them a major victory by voting to put the line almost entirely underground along Burbank and Chandler boulevards. Virtually every Valley homeowner group and most local elected officials had backed a Metro Red Line extension into the Valley rather than an overland rail system.

Last year, however, Riordan, who controls four votes on the MTA board, cast doubt on the feasibility of a Valley subway, saying the agency should study surface alternatives. His comments this week questioning the financial wisdom of a mid-Wilshire subway extension--a project of higher priority with the MTA than the Valley line--further discouraged those who have pushed for an underground Valley system for years.

So far, the cash-strapped transit agency has set aside no funds to extend the subway to Warner Center in Woodland Hills, a project estimated at $2.2 billion. Current funding takes the Metro Red Line into the Valley only as far as North Hollywood, where a station is to open in 2000.

“It does not bode well,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick, who represents the West Valley. “If we don’t have the funding for what we’ve started already, how are we going to have the funding for a new line?”

Still, those less adamant on placing the line underground saw some reason for optimism.

“I don’t think it’s a more ominous situation for the Valley,” said Nate Brogin, chairman of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.’s transportation committee. “The mayor is trying to reduce costs. By the reduction of costs for projects that need to be completed before Valley projects, I think that is his attempt to assure that money will be left over.”

Brogin said VICA would welcome an east-west line on the Burbank-Chandler corridor using the least-expensive means, whether above or below ground.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who has long championed a monorail along the Ventura Freeway, said the mayor’s comment shows “Rip Van Winkle has awakened to the fiscal reality. Subways are too expensive to build in Los Angeles County.”

“Now, [Riordan] can provide the leadership to make this dramatic change take place so the San Fernando Valley will have transportation without bankrupting the businesses along the subway route,” Antonovich said.

Some transit promoters said Thursday they have already come to accept the necessity of reevaluating their insistence on a subway.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, once a strong supporter of tunneling under the Valley, said images of sinkholes, stuck machinery and damaged businesses have made subway construction infeasible--politically as well as financially.

“It’s hard for me to go to the San Fernando Valley and say the subway is safer, more protective of your interests,” Yaroslavsky said. “I think the public just won’t buy it.”

Yaroslavsky said he has talked to Riordan and the area’s City Council members and all agree there is a need to rethink the commitment to a subway.

Guy McCreary of the Universal City/North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce said he would gladly consider other options to extend mass transit to the West Valley. The MTA’s priority must be to complete the North Hollywood segment, then to review all transit plans in light of reduced federal funding, he said.

“We undoubtedly have to reanalyze our position once North Hollywood is completed,” McCreary said. “What’s going to get us a line to the West Valley within our lifetimes? One way would be the technology of a future subway in a [covered] trench,” rather than a deep-bore subway.

Nonetheless, others believe that dwindling support for a subway can only shatter the delicately crafted political consensus that led to the 1994 agreement on the Burbank-Chandler line over Antonovich’s campaign for a rail system along the Ventura Freeway.

Since that action--which appeared to settle decades of squabbling--budget problems, tunneling mishaps and political controversy have made Valley subway supporters increasingly worried that their hopes may be dashed.

The MTA is being forced to reassess its mission of relieving freeway congestion in Los Angeles County because of a $1-billion shortfall in its long-range plan. Top agency officials have been called to Washington next week to discuss the $5.9-billion subway project.

In the Valley, any attempt to shift plans now may run into legal obstacles as well as a buzz saw of homeowners’ protests.

A 1991 law written by former Assemblyman Alan Robbins requires that any heavy-rail transit line crossing residential neighborhoods of North Hollywood or Van Nuys be built underground. Chick said taking the Valley line above ground from that point on to Warner Center would not be acceptable.

“If it’s subway for part of the line, I will not stand quietly by and allow the westerly part of that line done with a less expensive technology to make it pencil out,” Chick said. “My portion of the line is the one that is the most residential.”

“It’s generally thought that if we break from the subway, we break the consensus we struggled so hard for,” McCreary of the Universal City-North Hollywood chamber said.

Close of Sherman Oaks said he is seeking reaffirmation of the MTA’s commitment to the cross-Valley subway line and of Riordan’s support as well.

“Reevaluation means delay, means reducing the probability of anything being built,” he said. “We’ve studied this project to death. The time now is to build, not more studies.”