While the rest of the world is making its own New Year’s predictions, Mr. Corlin chimed in with speculation of his own.
Hunched forward on his favorite chair in his Santa Monica business office, he did not couch his words. He never does.
Like an unwelcome ex-spouse who moves in next door while a divorce still is healing, he suspects that Culver City will be saddled, possibly forever, with a so-called temporary ground-level light rail station in an East Side residential neighborhood. The neighbors dread the prospect. So do some people at City Hall.
A Haven of Doubt
Mr. Corlin entertains doubt whether the temporary light rail station on Wesley Street ever will be built.
“The trouble is, none of this is in writing,” he said. “It is not in the (recently voted upon Environmental Impact Report) that there will be a temporary station, let alone a permanent station at a different location.”
What if the Wesley station is built? “I worry that if they put in the temporary station, the MTA will say they don’t need to spend all the extra money they would on a permanent station for sound-proofing and the things that make a station livable for the neighborhood.”
Mr. Corlin remains frustrated with his teammates because they didn’t even consider his suggestion of bypassing a temporary station and urging the MTA to go directly to the permanent one.
Present plans vaguely call for an elaborate, high-speed light rail network to be erected from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica.
The whole project may have attracted as many cynics as true believers.
At City Hall in Santa Monica, no one is holding his breath that light rail will reach the beach any time in this century.
The MTA supposedly has $640 million available to build Phase I. It will need around $30 million more (by an abstract future date) to build Culver City’s location.
“If the MTA were smart,” said Mr. Corlin, a rarely invoked parenthetical accusation, “they would stop building the line at La Cienega, before they even get to Culver City. Then when Phase II of the project begins, they come to Culver City (and build the permanent station at Venice/Robertson).”
According to Mr. Corlin, the soonest the temporary station could be built is five years. The long date is eight years, meaning few or none of the present important players are likely to be around.
Doomed by Language?
Surveying what he regards as a mess, the chair of the Redevelopment Agency unequivocally blames his four colleagues.
In a letter of recommendation to the MTA in November, the Agency voted four to one to employ what Mr. Corlin calls “soft” language instead of assertive words.
Were his fellow Agency members “intimidated” by the awesome power and far-flung size of the MTA? “I don’t know how to answer that,” Mr. Corlin said.
He declined to say that the other four Agency members feared losing the project altogether if their language was too stiff, but it was a prospect he clearly had entertained.
Mr. Corlin said the five members of the Redevelopment Agency share a common objective, but the strategies of the rest are wrongheaded in his view.
“That four to one vote in November reflects a crucial difference in our approaches,” he said. “My fellow Agency members said things like they ‘hope’ the MTA finds the funding to build the line right away. They ‘trust’ that the parking, the traffic and other design issues will get worked out along the way.”
Mr. Corlin, who towers over his colleagues, is as forceful in his manner as he indicates they are not. “When it comes to large regional agencies like the MTA, I don’t count on ‘hope.’ I don’t count on ‘trust.’ I say, ‘Put it in writing.’”
In conclusion, Mr. Corlin dropped a heavy thought: “The bottom line is that the MTA played Culver City perfectly.”