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Politics & Government

City Council to Discuss Subway Route This Afternoon

Residents are expected to appear before the City Council to urge the panel to take a stronger position against a proposed Westside Subway Extension alignment to Century City.

A division between the City Council and the Board of Education about the best way to oppose a subway route to Constellation Boulevard in Century City may come to a head this afternoon at a council study session.

The second item on the agenda is a “Request by Council members Mirisch and Bosse for discussion by the City Council on the Westside Subway Extension Alignment.”

Members John Mirisch and Lili Bosse are proponents of taking a more aggressive stance to fight the proposed subway route to Constellation Boulevard. That route involves tunneling under and residences.

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Several of the five school PTA newsletters this week featured a note urging residents to attend this study session and speak during the public comment period. The note reflects an email being circulated among parents and leaders of the community’s various homeowners associations.

“For years Metro had planned the Century City station [to be located] at Santa Monica Boulevard, and that’s what our city agreed to. But at the urging of Century City developers and landowners, and lobbying by the Century City Chamber of Commerce, Metro now wants to put the station one block away at Constellation [Boulevard], which would require tunneling under our city’s only high school and principal disaster center,” the message says.

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“Tunneling under Beverly Hills High School and all the oil/methane fields beneath would not only pose safety issues and construction issues for 2,500 students and teachers, it would also seriously impact the ability of the [Beverly Hills Unified School District] to modernize the high school,” it says.

“Our school board has taken a very active role in trying to protect BHHS… We need to tell our City Council to take a leadership role and to reflect our united city and join us in saying very clearly that we will not support the subway extension or its financing if Metro chooses to tunnel under Beverly Hills High School," it adds.

The well-circulated message may help bring a large crowd to the study session. But even if many residents speak in favor of taking a more aggressive stance, it is unclear if the council majority of Mayor Barry Brucker, Vice Mayor Willie Brien and Councilman Julian Gold will want to change their approach.

Those members believe that private talks one-on-one with members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board are more effective than the Board of Education’s high-profile fight against the route. The school board has allocated to fight the route under BHHS and has hired a public relations firm to run a website about the Santa Monica Boulevard route.  

“I can’t be sure that our approach is the right one and the school board’s is the wrong one,” Brucker told Patch last week. “But if we can’t reach the Metro board members at all, we can’t get our message to them.”

Senior Metro board members have canceled meetings with Beverly Hills officials once the media learned of the gatherings, Brucker said.

“I had a productive meeting recently with a very senior MTA official in my home,” he said.

This official told Brucker that the MTA board would make a decision on the subway route in late fall. Metro has previously said it would make a decision by late summer.

The City Council study session begins at 2:30 p.m. and it will be broadcast live on BHTV10. The city’s website will stream the broadcast live for residents who do not receive BHTV10.

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