Beverly Hills

Last week, battle lines were drawn between the City of Beverly Hills, the Beverly Hills Unified School District and Metro over the location and routing of the Westside Subway. While Metro held a series of public meetings to show the results of their environmental studies, the last of the three hearings turned into a sort of rally against the project in Beverly Hills. For those scoring at home, Streetsblog has the highlights from last week.

"This is a project Los Angeles has been talking about for fifty years," Jody Litvak, Metro.

During yesterday's Metro Board Meeting, CEO Art Leahy reported that the Beverly Hills Unified School District would not allow Metro's experts to take advantage of the ongoing trenching studies going on at Beverly Hills High School, which are scheduled to end this weekend, without paying a cool $500,000 to the School District.  The trenching process is part of a study being conducted on behalf of the school district to respond to an earlier geotechnical study by a team of experts paid for by Metro that found that the safest place to run the Westside Subway was under a portion of the Beverly Hills High School Property.

(Note, the Beverly Hills Courier points out that they had the story first on Thursday evening despite my call that Patch broke the news. You can read their coverage, here. - DN)

(Update: Metro was actually on campus for seven different days doing studies in 2011: 2/19, 2/26, 2/17, 3/5, 3/6, 3/12, and 3/13. On some of the days, poor weather prevented them from getting good samples, but we should note they were there longer than one weekend.)

Century City Mailer for Web

(Steve Hymon reviews the geology and presentation from a scientific standpoint at The Source.  I'm considering this an unofficial companion piece looking at how today's presentation changes the politics.  Angelenos Against Gridlock were also updating their website throughout the presentation. - DN)

I know I promised that we weren't going to cover the fight over the Westside Subway routing debate until there was actual news, but the Subway won a huge victory earlier this week, and almost nobody noticed.

(Instead of covering the traditional gambit of events around the City/County that are part of Bike Month, we reached out to cyclists working on local groups and issues to talk about the experiences and challenges they face.  We tried to get folks from areas we don't usually cover on bike issues, (i.e. not Long Beach, not Wilbur Ave...) and are proud to present the first part of our Bike Week bonus coverage via Mark Elliot of Better Bike Beverly Hills.)