ROW OVER ROW OVER: Grassroots advocates block light rail from railroad right-of-way

by Garth Meyer

Questions of engineering and finance met one of philosophy Jan. 22 in Los Angeles, and the latter took precedence when, by unanimous vote, the Metro board of directors chose Hawthorne Boulevard for the path to extend light rail to the South Bay.

A total of 172 people gave public comment at Metro headquarters.

Those against the Hawthorne Boulevard route cited concerns about lost sales tax and disrupted businesses along the commercial corridor. Those in favor cited quality of life issues on the alternative proposed route, a railroad right-of-way (ROW) between neighborhoods in Lawndale and North Redondo Beach.

“There is no moral equivalency,” said Metro Board Director and Inglewood Mayor James Butts, before the vote. He, fellow director Holly Mitchell, who is also an L.A. County Supervisor, and two other boardmembers released a motion days before in support of the Hawthorne route.

At the packed Jan. 22 public hearing, Mitchell said the board will establish a Business Interruption Fund to aid the boulevard during construction of the raised tracks.

The board also certified the final Environmental Impact Report for both would-be routes. 

The 4.5-mile South Bay light rail extension will offer a single-seat ride from Torrance to LAX. Estimated project cost is $3.4 billion. 

The earliest date for when it would be complete is 2036. 

Was that the sound of champagne corks popping along the ROW last Thursday night?

Public sway

The City of Torrance issued a statement following the vote. 

“… The Hawthorne Blvd. option is projected to jeopardize over $28 million in annual sales tax losses to Torrance and nearly $164 million in annual impacts to L.A. County schools and services that depend on regional sales tax revenue,” the city said. “(We are) committed to protecting our local economy, and minimizing impacts to residents and businesses as this project moves forward.”

The Metro hearing at One Gateway Plaza downtown followed a May 2024 delay on the decision, led by Mayor Butts, who called for Metro staff to come back with a funding plan, a more detailed environmental impact analysis for the two routes, and to engage more effectively with South Bay residents. 

A year and a half later, the time was up. With red-shirts (“NO to ROW”) back in the plaza and the overflow area, the board took up the issue again.

“Metro has successfully built near homes, by freight lines,” said Metro Executive Director  Anthony Crump, as he and project director Georgia Sheridan presented their staff recommendation  – to run the rail line down the ROW, building two new tracks next to an existing freight line. 

“Our right-of-way is much wider here. (Only) a quarter-mile of it is the most restrained,” Crump said.

Public comment was first set at one minute per person, but was cut to 30 seconds, to accommodate the 257 people who signed up to speak.

Early input came from Torrance’s Mayor George Chen, Mayor Pro-Tem Sharon Kalani and City Councilmember Bridget Lewis, who said the board may be “choosing disruption over solutions.”

Redondo Beach Mayor Jim Light said the Hawthorne option would draw significantly more riders and avoid “all of the negatives” to families along the ROW.

Longtime No-on-ROW advocate Nikki-Negrete Mitchell told of her 27-year-old daughter on the autism spectrum, and how light rail on the ROW would displace the family.

North Redondo resident Holly Osborne compared the two potential routes.

“(The Hawthorne option) goes to a mall instead of a cemetery,” she said, referring to South Bay Galleria and Pacific Crest Cemetery, North of 182nd Street, which backs up to the right-of-way.

California State Senator Laura Richardson (District 35) called in, but her 30 seconds elapsed before she could deliver her conclusion. She later got back on the phone to say she supports the Hawthorne Boulevard option.

Lawndale Mayor Robert Pullen-Miles asked the board to ‘please put the train where commerce belongs.’

Another man said, “People would lose their homes, and/or their sanity.”

Alex Fineman, who opposed the Hawthorne route, submitted 587 signatures in favor of the ROW.

Redondo Beach Planning Commissioner Doug Boswell noted “obvious safety concerns” with the ROW route, and “greater ridership” on Hawthorne.

A Torrance business representative said the Hawthorne tracks would be “costly and onerous.” Another said Hawthorne Blvd. would not be a safe place to walk to and from transit stations.

“I’m here to break the news,” said another man. “You already live next to a train. Noise and chemical risks are completely unfounded.”

A woman followed: “This project I’ve been waiting for ever since I returned from living in Japan for six months in 1978.”

“Ridership, ridership, ridership,” said Mike Witzansky, Redondo Beach city manager. 

The two hours the board allowed for public comment then concluded, with 19 people still waiting to speak by phone.

“In 53 years of public service, this is the largest group of people I’ve heard from,” said Director Butts. “The statement of the day goes to; ‘transit goes to a mall instead of a cemetery.’ Fashion statement of the day to the red shirts, with Redondo councilman Zein Obagi, Jr.’s hat getting an honorable mention.”

Director Janice Hahn, who is also a County Supervisor, said, “There’s definitely two sides to this issue.”

She talked of a “long overdue single-seat ride to LAX. How to deliver it in a way that is safe, responsible and realistic.” 

She said Hawthorne Blvd. could add years of delay, due to required National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review, because the path incurs on a Cal-Trans right-of-way, and Hawthorne Blvd. also functions as State Highway 107.

Fellow Metro Director Jacquelyn Dupont-Walker said she was pleased to join Mitchell’s motion. 

“I am committed to helping businesses thrive during construction,” she said.

Director Tim Sandoval said, “This is a beautiful day. This is what democracy looks like.”

Director Ara Najarian said his chief of staff warned him not to get into the fray.

“I was 100 percent for the ROW three years ago, two years ago and up to about two weeks ago,” he said, but the representative of the southern tip of Glendale concluded that, “there comes a time… my respect for Supervisors Mitchell and Butts is something I could not just cast aside.”

“We have a responsibility to those we represent, and to do our due diligence,” Mitchell said.

In reference to NEPA, she said, “I think it’s this board’s responsibility to keep the project on budget and on time. I was always told NEPA was two years.”

In the end, Director Hahn gave a final vote to the Hawthorne route, “with apologies to Torrance.” She asked Mitchell to work with her to assure that if the Metro-owned right-of-way now goes up for sale, the Metro board will have a say in who it would be sold to.

Hahn – who represents Torrance, and who represented the Beach Cities cities until four years ago – suggested that, if the ROW is sold, and a freight company buys it, it could “do to this (Lawndale and North Redondo) community exactly what we’re trying to avoid.”

Then she made her conclusion.

“Now we just gotta build the damn thing.”

An activist

“I am overjoyed,” said Holly Osborne, a retired TRW/Northrop Grumman systems engineer and longtime advocate against using the ROW. “By what Mayor Butts said …quality of life over business.  I’ve been to every single planning and programming meeting, and after the May 2024 meeting they were always talking about quality of life… Lawndale was disadvantaged, it was redlined… I thought to myself, we’re going to win on that. Before I thought, as an engineer, we’re going to win because it didn’t fit. I did all that chart-making, pasting it on cardboard and lugging it around.”

She lives in North Redondo, a five-minute walk to the ROW. 

“I noticed the people who made the motion were those who had actually seen the ROW,” Osborne said.

How many meetings has she been to?

“Oh my God. At least three per month for the past three years. Whatever that adds up to. “[Late Redondo Beach Mayor] Bill Brand was our biggest backer at the start. Bill and [former Redondo city councilmen Nils Nehrenheim and Todd Loewenstein]. All came and made speeches at crucial moments.”

“I’m glad (the Metro board) made the morally right decision. I’ve just been dismayed from the beginning by the number of inaccurate drawings they had. Showing that Metro owned property that it didn’t own.”

“It doesn’t affect me at all. I got mad as an engineer because of what I perceived as deceptions by Metro. They had incredible pressure to use the ROW. ‘We’ve already paid for it.’ If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it dozens of times.”

The next step for Redondo Beach, suggested City Councilmember Paige Kaluderovic, is to address the South Bay Council of City Governments for help paying for the Hawthorne extension. The board allocates regional Measure M funds.

“This outcome is great.” she said. “It makes sense that other Metro boardmembers would defer to (local area directors) Mitchell and Butts, but that being said, going against a staff recommendation is a big deal. We’re actively working on ways to get people moving and out of their cars, and in bike lanes.”

“People heard us and listened to what we have been saying for the past four years,” said Redondo Councilman Zein Obagi, Jr. “The motion had all of the points we’d been articulating.”

It needed just seven of the 13 boardmembers to pass.

Obagi, Jr., said he never thought the hybrid ROW was a legitimate option, with stretches of the tracks underground at street crossings.

“What Metro have you ridden that goes up and down like a roller coaster?”

Past and future

It has been 46 years since Proposition A put forth the notion of a light rail extension to the South Bay. 

Director Mitchell noted more history in her Jan. 22 comments – how San Francisco got its BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit, because “Los Angeles took a pass. Leadership said we are going to (travel on) freeways. All of us are frankly suffering because of that.”

Mitchell referred to the amount of times she walked the ROW in the last few years, with residents, alone, and at different times of day.

“Some view this as NIMBYism, but it’s not that simple, not that sophomoric,” she said.

The supervisor talked about 178 homes immediately adjacent to the right-of-way, with 17 needing temporary construction easements. As for Hawthorne Blvd., “We enhance an existing commercial corridor,” she said, touting a higher ridership potential.

“I wouldn’t be recommending something I didn’t believe can and will get built.”

She added that the more-expensive Hawthorne option is 40+% funded. 

“More than is typical for a full-alignment project at this stage.”  

The director acknowledged “the construction complexity” of Hawthorne Blvd.., but that “the benefits outweigh the costs.” 

Metro bought the ROW in 1993 from BNSF Railway.

Once the strip was announced as a possible route for light rail, nearby residents began to bring up concerns about noise and vibration, proximity to houses, reduction of green space and potential air quality problems during construction. 

The Hawthorne route was estimated to take a year less to build than the ROW. But the elevated track is expected to cost $737 million more, though $1.4 billion has already been secured.

‘Conspiracy theory’

With the Hawthorne Blvd. choice now made, Redondo Councilmember Kaluderovic saluted the grassroots efforts of Nikki Negrete-Mitchell, Holly Osborne and Kaluderovic’s predecessor representing Redondo’s District Three, Christian Horvath.

“I wouldn’t shut up,” Negrete-Mitchell said, of one particular residents’ no-on-ROW meeting. “When I first heard of this, I thought it was like a conspiracy theory… All along I never felt defeated. From observing body language of the Metro board, I always had a feeling there was a smidgen of a chance.”

“Mayor Butts’ support was equally important (as Mitchell’s),” Kaluderovic said. “He recognized that we will not meet our regional transportation goals with shortsighted, pennywise and pound-foolish decisions. To reduce congestion and grow ridership, we must build a system that attracts riders and takes people where they want to go.”

The Business Interruption Fund is already in effect, used for a K Line project down Crenshaw Blvd. The new process will begin with informing Hawthorne Blvd. business owners two years before construction.

How large the fund will be is up for discussion, as will the number of eligible businesses. 

“Right of Say”

Glen Brackenridge moved from the Palms neighborhood of L.A. to the ROW in 2017. Soon after he and his wife bought a house, he happened upon information about the proposed light rail.

“I was shocked and worried, and realized a lot of people didn’t know about this,” he said.

A creative director for an entertainment advertising firm in West Hollywood, he founded “Right-of-Say.”

“They may have the right-of-way but we have the right of say,” he said.

Brackenridge made door hangers, flyers, a website and started to go to meetings.

“For a long time it was just me,” he said. 

He met the late Redondo Beach Mayor Brand and Mayor Butts. Then a group formed; Jennifer Dodge, the late Bruce Szeles, Holly Osborne, Ray Hollar, Lisa Garvan and later Chelsea Schreiber and Niki Negrete-Mitchell. 

“Once we had a rough framework, we just relied on our individual talents. We had engineers, a private investigator, an attorney, a psychologist, a retired guy from the railroad,” Brackendidge said. “It was like ‘Ocean’s 11,’ not for a cool heist, but for saving our community.”

In 2018, a California ballot measure to repeal a gas tax gave No-on-ROW hope. If Proposition 6 was approved, it would have cut funding to Metro, limiting their capacity to engineer a South Bay light rail extension. But voters said no and the tax, and Metro funding, continued at previous levels.

“In the early days, I thought maybe stopping the funding was our only hope,” Brackenridge said.

Schreiber and others later split off from Right of Say to form South Bay Environmental Justice Alliance, to ensure Lawndale was represented, and to spotlight alleged environmental factors on the ROW that they believed Metro’s draft Environmental Impact Report failed to address.

“Then in 2024, Mayor Butts gave us that lifeline,” Brackenridge said. “We knew we had to flip as many boardmembers as we could. We walked the ROW with Supervisor Mitchell.”

The last few weeks before Jan. 22 were spent getting more messages out, to encourage people to attend the meeting and speak.

“So many people had a very, kind of hopeless outlook, but to see where we were in 2024, and now, we convinced them. It was incredible. It fundamentally changed how I view government,” Brackenridge said. “I never thought we could do this in some ways, though I hoped we could.”

He suggests Metro was off-base in deeming the ROW the “locally preferred alternative.”

“It was a sunk-cost fallacy,” he said. “They bought that ‘you people have a freight train twice a day’ but that’s not the same thing as light rail 200 to 300 times a day. And how the community used this space, as basically the only park in Lawndale.”

“We did not know this outcome was such a strong possibility,” Brackenridge said. “As much as I desperately wanted this, I thought the best victory we’d get was to use lawsuits to delay, delay, and maybe they’d run out of money; that the funds would be allocated for other projects.” 

He commended Supervisor Hahn for her thought.to protect against the ROW selling to another freight company (which might want to put another track down it).

“That was one of those moments, I was really impressed,” Brackenridge said. 

What does he see happening next?

“I think you’ll see some answers from (Metro) change in terms of the feasibility of Hawthorne Blvd., because they have no choice.”

He lives on the narrowest part of the ROW.

“I look out on it right now and see how quiet and pretty it is,” Brackenridge said.

Metro issued a statement after the board’s vote. 

“… The next step for this project requires that Metro initiate environmental clearance for the Hawthorne Option under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which is expected to take two to four years to complete. Following the NEPA process, Metro would be eligible to pursue federal funding, as well as state and local funds.

Since 2021, Metro has received more than 2,000 public comments, reflecting a wide range of community perspectives. Metro remains committed to working closely with the South Bay community as the project moves forward through additional environmental review processes to improve regional connectivity.

Staff will return to the Board later this year with information on the NEPA process and to consider contracts to support NEPA environmental clearance, preliminary engineering, third-party coordination, station access, and First/Last Mile planning to advance the project.” ER

HOLLY MITCHELL INTERVIEW

Easy Reader spoke with Supervisor Mitchell Jan. 26. She estimates the amount of times she walked the ROW with staff and/or residents at four to five times, and the same number on her own, or at least being in the space observing. She began representing the area in 2022 after County Supervisorial districts were realigned.

Was there any particular thing you saw, learned or did in this process that swayed your opinion?

One of my board colleagues said that what he appreciated about my process was that I remained open-minded. I approached it from the beginning that… since I had just taken on this area, I didn’t have all the history. It is helpful when you don’t have a preconceived hypothesis for a sticky issue. You’re not weighed down with prior commitments which can complicate matters.

Also walking the ROW – hearing neighbor to neighbor conversations… it was probably a more accurate representation of the true community… There are parts where the ROW is narrower.

I (commend) Metro staff. They tried to make the ROW work. I just … when you lay tracks, that’s permanent… I recognized that (the Hawthorne Blvd. route) was less disruptive. I walked that business corridor. Those businesses could use the added foot traffic. Light rail will be reinvigorating, I ultimately believe that’s what will happen. People said this motion was last-minute. Not really. It’s been in the works. It’s been in the works.

Were you surprised it got a unanimous vote?

Not necessarily. 

“Locally Preferred Alternative” – did that term surprise you?

Metro was informed by the fact that Metro owned the property … All of the elected officials are different people since all of this began. Everybody could agree they want transit to the South Bay.

What do you expect to be the biggest issues now that this decision has been made?

To continue to make sure that it happens… There have been bigger funding gaps on projects that were ultimately built. This is so early in the process… we have state and federal funding. The Metro executives are stellar and we’ll get it done. ER