Wilshire advocates see red over Metro Rail route.

Despite losing the last round to a powerful congressman, a diehard coalition of business leaders and elected officials is still vowing to redirect the westerly leg of Metro Rail so it serves office towers and museums on Wilshire Boulevard instead of the already-approved Mid Cities route.

With construction only three years off, the coalition is attempting to reverse a string of decisions by Congress and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission to steer the giant subway south by way of Pico and San Vicente boulevards. However, the coalition's goal of revising the plan is considered a long shot at best because Mid-Wilshire representative Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles refuses to budge on a route change out of safety concerns.

Federal law prohibits Metro Rail tunneling under a large swath of Wilshire because the area contains methane, a volatile gas that is explosive in large concentrations. Meanwhile, the LACTC, which relies on Congress for half of the entire subway system's $4 billion cost, recently endorsed the Pico-San Vicente route after succumbing to pressure by Waxman.

But the coalition, led by Beverly Hills City Councilman Alan Alexander, attorney Larry McFarland and several key developers, argues the LACTC should revisit the issue because methane is also present along the 2.3-mile, $597 million Pico-San Vicente route. What's more, they contend, having the Metro Rail Red Line skirt 7.1 million square feet of office space in a section of Wilshire known as the Miracle Mile -- with its cluster of entertainment, media and financial services companies -- would be an economic blunder.

"This is not a gray area, it's black and white," said Alexander, a land use lawyer. "The LACTC will have to spend $200 million to bring the subway back to Wilshire and until they do, Metro Rail will miss high-density buildings. We need to re-evaluate before we start wasting money."

Alexander's arguments have struck a responsive chord not only with builders, who hope to erect new skyscrapers along busy rail corridors, but with officials at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of National History and two bypassed by Metro Rail will crimp their ability to expand yearly museum visitors well past the 4 million mark they expect by the year 2000; currently, the Miracle Mile museums draw 2.2 million visitors annually.

The westerly section of the Red Line is slated to make its debut in the year 2001.

McFarland, a lawyer with downtown Los Angeles-based Baker, Hostetler, McCuthen Black, said the Pico-San Vicente route makes even less sense in terms of ridership because it would serve only 53,755 daily, compared to 104,241 on the Wilshire Corridor. The transportation commission disputes those estimates, saying ridership on both routes is roughly comparable.

Nevertheless, said McFarland, a Miracle Mile resident, "You put mass transit where there are people and Wilshire has a greater population than Pico. Why does Waxman think he can tell us how to build our subway?"

Added Mid-Wilshire developer Wayne Ratkovich, owner of the Wiltern Theatre, "Wilshire is the only linear downtown we have and it makes far more planning sense" as the subway heads west to its final destination in Westwood.

Sympathetic but unyielding to those arguments are Waxman, a longtime subway critic, and Julian Dixon, D-Los Angeles, a member of the House Appropriations Committee. Both leaders have been instrumental in backing Metro Rail money at a time when Congress is wary about the project, given other states' transit requests.

Under current plans, the subway would head southwest to Pico by slicing under Crenshaw Boulevard.

The fight over Metro Rail's westerly route began in 1985 after a methane explosion gutted a Ross Dress for Less clothing store north of Wilshire at the intersection of Third Street and Fairfax Avenue. After that incident, which injured 24, the Los Angeles City Council designated a 400-block area of Wilshire between La Brea and Western avenues as a "gas risk zone."

Reacting to the explosion, Waxman in 1986 agreed to support plans for the federal government to kick in nearly $700 million for the first section of subway, but he tied that funding and all future federal money to the requirement that Metro Rail tunneling stay out of the Wilshire risk zone.

That six-year-old U.S. government ban, which Waxman authored and promoted as then-chairman of the House's Health, Environmental and Safety subcommittee, remains in force today.

Before the Ross Dress for Less incident, Los Angeles transit officials expected to bring the subway out of the central Union Station terminal all the way west underneath Wilshire. LACTC planners say the Red Line will eventually jog back to Wilshire, perhaps by way of La Brea or Fairfax avenues or La Cienega Boulevard, though no congressional money has yet been secured.

Since 1987, LACTC and city experts have found concentrations of methane in Pico-San Vicente and Hollywood. That discovery prompted the City Council last month, in a symbolic gesture, to side with the coalition by urging Congress to remove the federal ban against tunneling under Wilshire.

Alexander is now seeking sponsorship for an amendment to the recently enacted Federal Surface Transportation Act, requiring the LACTC to study the Wilshire route at the same time it is preparing the final environmental impact report for Pico-San Vicente. That study is due this September, giving the Wilshire coalition time to fight.

"We know it's an uphill fight," Alexander said, adding that efforts to lobby Congress and coalesce local support are continuing.

So far, however, Waxman hasn't had a change of heart, even though he said he has reviewed updated maps showing pervasive oil-based methane around the city.

"The bottom line is that I'm not convinced that it's safe to tunnel down the Wilshire Corridor," Waxman wrote to a constituent April 29. "For me, the increased risk of serious injury and loss of life to workers outweighs whatever benefits the Wilshire option brings. And I won't simply . . . get out of the way just because there's concerted effort to pressure me."

Dixon, in a phone interview with the Business Journal last month, said he wouldn't pull his support for the Pico-San Vicente alignment either.

"Basically, this is an argument that has been fought. The only way we've kept the entire project moving was by agreeing with Waxman's" legislation not to bore under the gas risk zone, Dixon said. He added the Mid-Cities area includes parts of Korea-town and fast-growing Hispanic neighborhoods that deserve a subway because they have traditionally received less mass transit services than more affluent Southland areas.

Then, too, the LACTC had compelling monetary reasons not to pressure Waxman to lift the methane prohibition. When the commission won $993 million for approved Metro Rail routes from Congress last October, it also got an extra $237 million under a strategy orchestrated by Dixon.

That money will allow the LACTC to tunnel and build Pico-San Vicente's two subway stations, at the intersections of Olympic and Crenshaw boulevards and Pico-San Vicente, without having to risk applying for additional federal subsidies.