Nineteen supposedly blissful days after Expo’s vaunted light rail happily descended upon Culver City, the first thundering protest has exploded, with fury, before the City Council.
Linda Firth, of Fay Street, East Culver City, and her husband Tom were the first arrivals at last night’s special Council meeting at Lin Howe School because she was bursting to deliver her withering complaint:
The train, which runs from 5 in the morning to 1 in the morning, is too fast, too loud, is torpedoing the sleeping habits inside the 28 homes on her block of Fay Street. Council members, what are you going to do about it? she asked.
“It is terrible, absolutely terrible,” she said.
Well, What Is Next?
Ms. Firth is demanding relief, and she is not offering a roadmap “because I am not an expert. Others are.”
Ms. Firth does not expect to be handed a ready-made solution, whether it is extending the sound wall now in place or something more imaginative.
An organizer by training and by desire, she huddled with several City Hall officials last evening. She assured each of them that her neighbors are banding together, and this is not the last time she will be heard from in public.
She means to make a dent in the happy rhetoric over Expo restoring train service to Culver City for the first time in 59 summers.
Councilman Mehaul O’Leary, who lives in East Culver City, and Public Works Director Charles Herbertson both lent sympathetic ears to Ms. Firth – out of genuine empathy and also because this is the first serious complaint about the still like-new train that has reached them.
Mr. O’Leary asked Ms. Firth to invite him to her home so he could experience the clatter first-hand, and she promptly complied.
The quiet-spoken Mr. Herbertson spent an extended amount of time with the Firths, and he sought to cool her down because, he said, a panacea, if there be one, is well into the future.
The reason: For both City Hall and Expo experts to fully explore, digest and regurgitate Ms. Firth’s objections will take at least weeks, if not months.
She Knows Them
During a break in the Council meeting, Mr. O’Leary patiently was explaining that he is the Culver City delegate to the Expo board. As he was ticking off the names of his six colleagues, the well-informed Ms. Firth shook her head, indicating her familiarity with each of them.
She goes to meetings, and she pleads her case, but still is without relief.
She is conversant enough with the political process to stand up at a community meeting and say, “I have contacted MRT about this. I don’t know if he can do anything.”
Only those who know MRT refer to him that way publicly.
MRT is County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, responsible for this one-fifth slice of the County.
Ms. Firth is convinced that some light rail officials have not just spoken hyperbolically but have lied about the way the train operates and what a dream it would be for those lucky enough to live within earshot of Expo.
Having lived on Fay Street for 34 years, she is concerned about the possibility of home values being depreciated by the sudden intrusion of the disruptive light rail.
The noise that causes the Firths and others to wear earplugs to bed didn’t start on official Opening Day for Expo, June 20, she told the Council members. The trouble began two months earlier when the run was being tested. Again. And again.
