Exposition Light Rail advocates were all smiles in early August during a historic ground-breaking ceremony in Downtown Los Angeles. However, the ecstatic thoughts that a long-awaited project would finally come true were quickly replaced with worry over whether there would be enough funding to take the project all the way through to Santa Monica.
The Expo project is split into two phases — from Downtown Los Angeles to Culver City, and from Culver City to a proposed terminal at Fourth Street and Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica. The worries stemmed from a battle in Sacramento where, for months, state legislators grappled with reaching an agreement on the budget, keeping state transportation funding, including an estimated $314 million for the light rail project, tightly sealed for the time-being. The political stalemate was finally broken on Aug. 21 — 51 days after the beginning of the fiscal year. A few weeks later, the California Transportation Commission gave Expo its $314 million.
“It’s critical that construction on phase one move forward and we have the necessary money now,” Darrell Clarke, a Santa Monican who is a member of the Friends 4 Expo Transit, said in August.
It was a brief sigh of relief. In November, officials with the Exposition Construction Authority announced that the light rail project had hit another snag — the first phase was battling a $145 million deficit.
“We have a lot of support for the project on this board and hopefully they will approve the increase,” said Samantha Bricker, the chief operating officer for the Exposition Construction Authority.
Expo officials were planning to meet with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to seek additional funding.
It was also a good year for subway hopefuls when the Senate Appropriations Committee pushed for a removal of a ban on tunneling under the Wilshire Boulevard corridor, paving the way to bring the subway line from Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue in the Mid-Wilshire district to Santa Monica.
Congress is currently moving to lift the ban on tunneling. The measure, by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, is part of a year-end spending bill that passed the House recently and is sitting in the Senate. The federal ban was put into place in the mid 1980s, supported in part by Congressman Henry Waxman of West Los Angeles, who has since reversed his stance on tunneling.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 27, 2007. Read the original PDF.