A disappointed but determined to fight on County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas scored a skinny conditional half-victory this afternoon at the stormy Metro Board meeting downtown, sort-of convincing his colleagues to approve a light rail station for Leimert Park if a longshot economic bet is covered.
Badly outnumbered in a steep uphill war engineered with sandpapered volatility by Board members Zev Yaroslavsky, Richard Katz, John Fasana, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Mr. Ridley-Thomas started out behind and steadily fell farther back.
His unrelenting rivals said no slack money was available for the two improvements he sought for the Cremshaw-to-LAX light rail to be built next year in his district.
But they added that if bidding for the project comes in under the present $1.715 billion estimate, Leimert Park can have a rail station.
Bidding on a project of this magnitude has not come in below estimates since the day after the Garden of Eden was razed.
Although most of Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s foes have urged fiscal flexibility for their own pet projects along the way, they organized a steel-strength united front today under a single banner.
They repeated in unison, at $400 million, the two additions/improvements Mr. Ridley-Thomas wants for the Crenshaw-to-LAX light rail project were too expensive.
Supervisor Ridley-Thomas’s doubledecker motion for enhancing the Crenshaw-to-LAX light rail project was splintered into two separate motions early on — a cinch sign of trouble.
The Supervisor’s bid for an underground passage through Park Mesa Heights was walloped 10 to 3, Mr. Yaroslavsky leading the teeth-gritting opposition to Mr. Ridley-Thomas.
On a 5½-hour morning and afternoon bulging with arcane, convoluted parliamentary manipulations by the aforementioned quartet, the substitute motion that vaguely may — or may not — have secured the Leimert Park rail station was so esoteric even Mr. Ridley-Thomas voted against it.
Several of Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s sternest rivals sought to assure him that he had won. He knew better. “We know what we need to do to move forward,” he said, icily.
A core problem was that Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s original motion, an attempt to at least salvage a rail station for classy Leimert Park, was whittled down from its original robust form to raw skin, a scab. When it passed on a 9 to 3 vote, the supervisor was as grim as if he had lost.
Which he well may have.
Despite protestations to the contrary by Mr. Katz, architect of the substitute motion, numerous stars in the heavens must align for much-praised Leimert Park to win a rail station when the project gets underway next year.
Lisa Richardson, a principal deputy to Mr. Ridley-Thomas, was not disheartened. “The Supervisor meant it when he said ‘the work isn’t done.’ This was not decisive. This vote is not final. The Supervisor said ‘We now have work to do.’ And we will.”
