First of two parts
Two weeks ago this afternoon, to their shock and disgust, young Jason Ranne and his wife found out, accidentally, that the builders of the Expo light rail intended to install a noisy, smelly, 24-hours-a-day train maintenance yard facility in their Santa Monica neighborhood.
It gets worse.
Expo means to build it directly across the street from the Rannes’ home on Exposition Boulevard, on a sprawling property in the Stewart Park neighborhood owned and occupied by Verizon.
No announcement was made. An acquaintance found a notice in a draft environmental impact report.
Expo’s light rail link from Culver City to Santa Monica vaguely is planned to start operation sometime between 2011 and ’15, so there is time for the neighbors to mount a protest war.
Surrounded scores of their technicolor friends and neighbors, Jason and Katie Ranne are leading a measured, focused charge.
They are not claiming victory, because the immediate and mid-term future are much too amorphous, throbbing with variables beyond everybody’s control.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority, according to neighbors, stealthily surveyed the prospects for the final stop on the proposed Expo light rail from downtown Los Angeles to Culver City, and when that gets built, Santa Monica is scheduled to be the next and final stop
Standing between two Los Angeles corporate behemoths, the Metropolitan Transit Authority and Verizon, you might think the neighbors would feel outmuscled and perhaps be cowed.
They are not.
A Cultural Lesson
Stewart Park probably never is mentioned among Santa Monica’s glamourous neighborhoods, but it definitely is on the way. Gentrification has arrived. A mixture of entrenched residents and relative newcomers, younger, older and middle-aged households, neighbors hail from enough different cultures to keep you busy counting and researching for awhile.
The oldtimers have been through a disproportionate number of crises, and the newer arrivals can easily summon the energy needed to stage a winning fight.
Angered by what some regard as a sneak attack on their homes, neighbors organized, planned and they put the hip, young and articulate Mr. Ranne out front.
The group fired off email to the media, headlined “Stewart Park Neighborhood in an Outrage Over Proposed Location of Train maintenance Yard Facility in Their Neighborhood.”
Their Side of the Story
Not yet 30 years old, Mr. Ranne is tall, narrow and boyish looking media professional.
He looks entirely at home in the generously windowed, wide-open and plenty casual environment of a Westside media group.
As a media person, he started his story on page one.
At one time they were fully on MTA’s side.
“On Feb. 20, my wife was in our neighborhood,” Mr. Ranne said, “walking our dog, and a man who lives in our neighborhood asked her if she knew about a draft environmental impact report.
“We are excited about the light rail coming to Santa Monica. And we are proponents of light rail. But that was all. He said we should check it out because they were planning to put a maintenance yard on the Verizon property.
“Within a couple days of us learning about it, we printed a hundred and fifty flyers. We put them on mailboxes, cars, doors and handed them out in the neighborhood to try and raise a little awareness.
“Another thing about our neighborhood. Multi-cultural. Different languages are spoken there.
“When we went out this week to get petition signatures, the Spanish-speaking community clearly had no concept of the maintenance facility. I don’t know if the draft environmental impact report was translated into Spanish. But that, obviously, would be important.
“Going through the process of the petition, quite a few people did not know about it. So we had to explain, ‘This is what it is,’ and ‘This is why it is important to you,’” Mr. Ranne.
Last Tuesday night, about a dozen residents of the Stewart Park neighborhood, armed with a 200-signature petition, confronted the Santa Monica City Council , their first public appearance in what promises to be an arduous and lengthy campaign.
(To be continued)
