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Politics & Government

Brucker Meets with Villaraigosa for MTA Talk

The Beverly Hills mayor wants to halt a proposal to tunnel under the city's high school.

Mayor Barry Brucker met with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Thursday—and plans to meet with him again Friday—in another attempt to persuade the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board chairman not to route the under Beverly Hills High School.
 
Villaraigosa is hosting a two-day leadership meeting for Los Angeles County mayors as part of his duties as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
 
"It is a real intimate conference of about 50 mayors, so I met with him today for a few minutes," Brucker told Patch on Thursday. "I expect to see him again tomorrow to follow up on our July 5 meeting."

Brucker, Vice Mayor Willie Brien and City Manager Jeff Kolin met with Villaraigosa, Deputy Metro CEO Paul Taylor and other MTA board members on July 5 to discuss Beverly Hills' latest offer of a park-and-ride that could help bring riders to a Santa Monica Boulevard stop in Century City, Brucker said.
 
Beverly Hills officials suggested a few months ago that Metro move the proposed Santa Monica Boulevard stop one block east to Century Park East. Such a move would enable the route to avoid a fault line under Santa Monica Boulevard; MTA has said it wanted to move the Century City stop to Constellation Boulevard in part to avoid the fault.

The Constellation Boulevard stop, however, would entail tunneling under  and the  office.
 
If the stop were placed at Century Park East, Brucker said, it could have two entrances—one toward Avenue of the Stars and one toward Century Park East. Under that scenario, the park-and-ride space Beverly Hills is offering would be just one block from the latter entrance.
 
The city offered Metro two locations for such a park-and-ride. One would be on top of the old train tracks near the , which could hold about 300 spots, and the other would be across the street in the former Robinsons-May parking lot at 9900 Wilshire Blvd., which could hold about 500 spots.

“This [proposal] really got Villaraigosa’s attention because it would be the only park-and-ride on the Westside,” Brucker said. Still, he has yet to hear back from the Los Angeles mayor.

An earlier offer from Beverly Hills officials to build a park-and-ride facility at the  is still on the table, Brucker said. But he believes that a parking facility near the Century City stop would be more attractive to the MTA.
 
Any park-and-ride facility built for the subway would be paid for entirely by Metro, he said.
 
Brucker defended the City Council’s approach to fighting the MTA on the proposed subway route under BHHS. Some residents, including members of the Board of Education, have said that the council’s approach to the MTA has been too lenient.

“There are advantages to us not becoming one unified voice [with the school board],” he said. “If we spoke with one voice we’d have no meeting opportunities with MTA board members and I refuse to give up that opportunity.”
 
He added that neither the council nor BHUSD has accomplished the goal of getting the MTA to agree to the Santa Monica Boulevard route.

Before his meeting with Brucker, Villaraigosa returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., to support a that would move up the construction date of the Westside Subway Extension. 

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