Link: Santa Monica Dispatch » Blog Archive » Expo Yard Belongs Downtown
Expo Yard Belongs Downtown
By: Peggy Clifford
Published: October 8th, 2009
The Expo Construction Authority and City staff persist in saying that the Verizon property at Stewart Street and Exposition Boulevard, just south of the Lantana complex is the only suitable location in this area for the Expo light rail maintenance yard.
Finding it impossible to believe That there weren’t other likely stets
Along the line in West L.A. or Santa Monica, my friend Craig Bowie and I went exploring.
We found a couple of likely sites in West L.A. near Anawalt Lumber, another under the 405 freeway and still another next to a small government complex.
But the two most likely sites are right here in Santa Monica. One is on the south side of Colorado west of 20th Street. It’s a kind of building junkyard now, but it’s large and well-located.
We’re sure someone, the City, a developer has big plans for this tumbledown site. But Santa Monica is choking on big plans, and is in desperate need of some sensible plans.
What could be more sensible and sustainable than creating a transportation center on and around the bus yards? The freeway is there. the bus yard has just undergone an $80 million renovation, so presumably it has everything it needs. The western terminus of the Expo light rail line is a block away.
The Expo maintenance yard could be located under either the bus yard or the western terminus, which would reduce its negative impacts and muffle its noise. The cost of the big dig would be less than the cost of any surface acreage.
City Hal ls teeming with planners and consultants who should be able to fashion a multi-model transportation center that would fuse the freeway, Big Blue and the Expo light rai line into one smooth coordinated operaton. It’s either that or an endless collision of both vehicles and the jurisdictions.
We can assume that both the Big Blue and Expo bosses, and their bosses will resist any effort at o-mingling, but our traffic problems are bigger than all of them, and urgent. And it’s our town. Later this month, City staff is scheduled to show the City Council revised plan for the Verizon site.
But, however “suitable” it may be for the City or Expo, it is an utterly unsuitable site for the Expo maintenance yard. A lawyer for Lantana appeared at the last hearing, and suggested that the noise from the yard would wreak havoc with Lantana tenants’ sound, recording and editing operations. He went on to say that Lantana would take whatever steps were necessary to protect its production company tenants.
The people who live on Exposition at the south end of the site would
suffer a drastic diminution in their way of life, if the maintenance yard were installed across the street.
It’s a pretty, quiet tree-lined street. The houses and apartment buildings are compact, attractive. Their gardens are very green. It’s an altogether pleasant prospect.
But if the City and Expo have their way, it will be another victim of “progress.”
As Pico Neighborhood residents pointed out at previous hearings, their neighborhood has endured more than its share of so-called progress, while enjoying little real progress. Residents cited the loss of a thriving section of the Neighborhood to the Freeway in the 1960s, and the freeway noise and pollution teat have assaulted them daily for more than 40 years. The City’s “waste management” division is also located in the Pico Neighborhood.
When they learned that the City and Expo were planning to put the maintenance yard in their neighborhood, some residents described it as “environmental racism.”
Expo maintenance yards operate on their own clocks, employ dozens of people, who come and go in cars and trucks, use all manner of chemicals for cleaning and general maintenance, some of which are bound to be toxic 230-ton cars roll in and out at grade, crossing neighborhood streets.
In sum, it’s a noisy, busy, toxic, high volt factory that does not belong in a residential neighborhood.
City staff has spoken of isertung a “buffer” between the yard and its residential neighbors to the south – a two or three-story “mixed use” complex, with stores on the furst floor and apartments on the upper floors.
But even if there were a developer desperate enough to build such apartments overlooking the noisy, noxious yard, there probably aren’t tenants desperate enough to live In them. Besides, while the current residents might find a neighborhood grocery store useful, they may not welcome a couple
of blocks of stores right across the street. Nor would they welcome a block of three story buildings casting long shadows on their houses and gardens.
Clearly, the only way out is to locate the yard n a truly suitable site—such as the City’s proposed transportation enter in m downtown Santa Monica.
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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