Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Awkwardly Defends Push For Westside Subway in New York Times

L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

This past Monday, the New York Times ran a story about the brewing controversy in Beverly Hills over the Westside subway. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who's pushing hard for the underground rail line, awkwardly defended his position to the paper.

A little background: Beverly Hills community leaders are peeved that Metro plans to tunnel underneath the Beverly Hills High School campus, which could jeopardize multi-million-dollar renovation plans they have there. Villaraigosa, a Metro board member, has close political ties to deep-pocketed power players in Century City. They want the subway route to go underneath the high school campus so a station can be built on Constellation Boulevard.

In the New York Times, Villaraigosa disregards the concerns about the high school and hints that something more sinister is going on.

"Remember: Beverly Hills has a history of opposition to the subway," Villaraigosa says. "I can't tell you what their motivations are. They say they want it, but they don't want it there."

Hmmmm... Beverly Hills folks have been showing up at Metro meetings that Villaraigosa has attended and sent him letters and reports for over a year, telling him exactly why they don't want the subway to go underneath the school's campus.

Has he been reading that stuff?

At the end of the piece, the New York Times quotes Beverly Hills Unified School Board President Brian Goldberg: "This is being driven by development interests, and whether those campaign contributions have contributed to the decision to have the subway site at the building is something that concerns me greatly."

Villaraigosa responds that such a concern is "so ridiculous that it doesn't even deserve a response. They are just desperate and grasping at straws."

Well, L.A. Weekly showed in a July 14, 2011, cover story that Goldberg is far from crazy.

"The key cheerleader for [the Westside subway] is Mayor Villaraigosa, chairman of Metro's board of directors," we wrote. "Villaraigosa has taken at least $296,000 for his pet political projects and election campaigns from JMB Realty and Westfield Corporation, two large developers whose Century City property values would be enhanced by having a subway at their doors.

"At a recent Century City 'power breakfast,' Villaraigosa publicly backed the Constellation station, telling the crowd that a subway stop 'needs to be right here in the heart of Century City.'"

Additionally, we noted:

"JMB Realty owns the SunAmerica skyscraper at Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars, and plans to build the 37-story Century City Center on open land at that intersection. The subway station at Constellation would run almost to the lobbies of those two highrises. Another JMB skyscraper, formerly called the MGM Tower, is a half-block away.

"JMB's alliance with Villaraigosa dates to 2006, when the Weekly reported that the mayor received $100,000 from the firm to spend on his Committee for Government Excellence and Accountability. At the time, Villaraigosa's committee was lobbying the California Legislature for a new law giving him veto power over the hiring and firing of the L.A. Unified School District superintendent. Villaraigosa's bold and bitterly fought education reform was found unlawful by a judge.

"Two years later, Judd Malkin and Neil Bluhm sponsored a June 3, 2008, fundraiser with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to help finance Villaraigosa's mayoral re-election campaign. JMB's event for Villaraigosa in Chicago raked in nearly $96,000, with Malkin's and Bluhm's employees, family members and associates contributing heavily."

The political connections are there, and they are certainly not ridiculous.

Contract Patrick Range McDonald at pmcdonald@laweekly.com.

Tags:

Antonio Villaraigosa, Beverly Hills, Brian Goldberg, LA Weekly, New York Times, Patrick Range McDonald, Westside subway

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manuel99a

"Villaragrosa publicly backed the Constellation station, telling the crowd that a subway stop 'needs to be right here in the heart of Century City"..."having a subway at their doors." I guess having a subway drop you off blocks away from your destination is better. Let's say that the Mayor never received campaign contributions from this company, where would the best location be for a station for the Century City area?

draimanformayor

YJ Draiman for Mayor of Los Angeles - 2013

“Transparency and accountability is my motto”

In order to change direction, we must change the leaders and their staff

Decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world for many generations into the future. Ensuring that decisions being made about our energy, water, and natural resources are sustainable is central to this belief. This also applies to political, financial and economic decisions that affect/obligates current and future generations. We must improve our education system and our public transportation system, if we are to advance economically in Los Angeles

We need honest government with integrity.“Good leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion”Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.

YJ Draiman

georgebuzzetti

There are many problems concerning the "Subway to the Sea." First, MTA is putting it through 1,000 times the methane and H2S they have worked with before, according to their own EIR. Second, They want ot put it under Beverly Hills High School. This has never been done before especially with the abandoned wells, a live well and oil and gas problems. Beverly Hills finally passes a bond for school improvement, including the high school, and now all their plans are up in the air as a result of the "Subway to the Sea" intransigence for billionaires at the expense of others . According to the EIR, but not included in their budget, yet mandatory, is another $6-10 billion ups and extras, This has been confirmed. Is it any wonder Villaraigosa wants the "Permatax."

Now think about how Villaraigosa and the MTA told Beverly Hills, one of the highest, and Crenshaw, which is one of the lower income communities, where to go!!! If there ever was a reason for two communites to unite for common interest and show that all communities can join together it is them now. A new political message can be forged by this kind of creativity. Think about the machines worst nightmare. All communities joining for a common real interest. We are all, except for the top 1/10 of 1%, in the same boat. 1% is about $350,000 which is a real good money but not real money. Crenshaw and Beverly Hills, do the "Right Thing" and join and win. Eisenhower only wanted people who had played group sports as he knew it took a team against the big power. He warned us of this divide and conquer plus military-industrial complexes of all kinds.

hughg

LA desperately needs 'connected' mass transit. The current Century City subway site was chosen based upon: Engineering (the route BH desperately tries to justify runs directly "along" a fault line rather than safely "across" one); Logic (the BH preferred route would have the stop next to the LA Country Club rather than directly in the middle of a neighborhood where ten's of thousands have worked for decades); and Least Disruption during construction. The worries about "risk" from tunneling under the school have been repeatedly dispelled. In the end, BH no doubt wants the subway to bypass Century City so its property values won't decline further, but mass transit needs to serve "the masses," not those with the loudest voice.

Chance.

The mass transit plan, from Century City to Ontario Airport is an exercise in political favors and broken promises. That doesn't necessarily mean that its all bad, or a waste of dollars. But it does mean that some people get rail-roaded (the bad kind), and others get rail road (the good kind).

I say fight the powers at be to protect your best interest. Otherwise, you'll go the way of some parts of the city and end up being on the wrong side of the tracks. We can start fighting back against our disenfranchisement by denying the counties request for more transit taxes. If the city wants to build infrastructure for their friends at the cost of everyone else, make them take at least another 30 years to do it.