Sent from the Beverly Hills Courier via email, March 31, 2014
The City Council Tuesday night again considers Metro's carte blanche
permit to tear up Wilshire Boulevard, obstruct traffic on Wilshire, take
away parking, shut-off access to businesses and block residents from
their homes.
Attached is a link to the City's staff report. It
mainly deals with inventorying parking meters. You will note that it
has no mention of cost, timeline, deadlines, or enforcement.
This
is a typical bureaucrat whitewash of a tough problem - how to rip up
your main street and APPEAR like you have planned for the problems.
Most
of the report consists of scans of individual comment cards submitted
by those who attended two meetings about the permit. A Courier reporter
with extensive experience attending Metro meetings and living through
Metro construction attended all these meetings. ACCORDING TO ALL WHO
ATTENDED, METRO AND CITY STAFF FAILED UTTERLY TO PROVIDE ANY CONCRETE
ANSWERS. The consensus, "The meetings were a joke."
If you read
the report, you will not be able to find one word about what happens to
residents and City businesses. There is no provision whatsoever for
handling blocked access for police, fire or paramedic. As for
communications, the report contradicts itself. First it says that
"there is redundancy" so no one will lose contact with phones and
internet. In another place, it discusses what the utility companies
must complete to "splice" various lines.
There is no enforcement mechanism in the staff report.
There is no penalty attached to Metro's failures.
There is no plan submitted by Metro - AT ALL!
Metro has no contractors selected yet.
There is no draft permit from the City attached.
There is no demand that Metro deposit money to take care of damages to property or other City assets.
Beverly Hills is entitled to know what will be done, when, how, by whom, and what happens if Metro fails.
NONE OF THESE SIMPLE QUESTIONS IS ANSWERED.
This
should be a non-starter. Metro needs to take our City seriously and it
does not. From reading this report, the City of Beverly Hills
highly-paid bureaucrats do not either.
Beverly Hills NEVER allows
a private builder to get away with such meager submissions. We don't
know why our City bureaucrats deem it more important to join forces with
their buddies at Metro than to protect our City.
This first
permit will be the model for all to come - if our City Council accepts
this phony, superficial report as the basis for future permits, they
should be recalled.
City's Staff Report
Purpose
