The Beverly Hills Unified School District filed a petition Monday seeking a court order compelling the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to release technical information on tunneling and station locations related to the
In a petition filed with Los Angeles County Superior Court, the BHUSD alleges that MTA officials have violated the California Public Records Act by improperly withholding public documents requested by the BHUSD over a period of several months. As Patch has reported, the BHUSD to possibly tunnel under Beverly Hills High in order to place a Century City subway stop on Constellation Boulevard.
“[The] MTA has not been forthcoming with a full production of documents or copies of the ongoing studies which MTA promised it would produce in response to BHUSD requests,” the 36-page petition says in part.
Metro is considering several locations for the Century City stop, and the MTA board is scheduled to make a final decision by August. The BHUSD and most city officials favor a subway route that would go underneath Santa Monica Boulevard to a stop at Avenue of the Stars in Century City, while an alternate Metro proposal would tunnel under BHHS to arrive at Constellation Boulevard.
“We tried to work with the MTA, but they chose to ignore or reject our numerous requests for information,” Board of Education President Lisa Korbatov said in a statement posted on centurycitysubway.org, a website organized by the BHUSD.
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The BHUSD and other "concerned citizens" have been dealing in speculative hyperbole from day one. Any good engineer designs her/his project to minimize the risk of damage to people and structures above, in case of disaster or attack. And yet subway opponents in Beverly Hills have repeated their fears of earthquake cave-ins and tunnel-based terrorist attacks on the students at the surface, even though these things have never happened in history, and are not likely to happen, due to the depth of the tunnels and the massive volume of interceding dirt. But I guess facts and science are only convenient when they support your position, Dr. Goldberg?
Manhattan is a singularly bad comparison, but even there, if new subway lines are being built, they should be build along the least intrusive, most cost-effective routes.
Hopefully, in what would be a twist of irony, we won't be faced with fear-mongering to try to discredit the more sensible Santa Monica alignment on the basis of supposed fault lines and potential earthquake damage.