This Wednesday evening at 6:30 at the Foshay Learning Center auditorium the most important meeting to date in our battle with the MTA to build the Expo Line underground through the South L.A. community will take place.
The Judge and the Commissioner in our case before the California Public Utilities Commission, from whom the MTA must receive approval before they can lay tracks, will be providing one last opportunity for the public to comment before the Public Utilities Commission on the deadly, disruptive and discriminatory street-level railroad crossings around Dorsey High School, which is just 10 feet from the tracks, and Foshay Learning Center, which is just 50 feet from the tracks.
We have confirmed that CPUC Commissioner Timothy Simon has been pressured by Westside politicians, and our own City Council member, Bernard Parks, who represents the area around Foshay, to rubberstamp the MTA’s unsafe plan and ignore the requests of the community, the neighborhood councils, LAUSD, UTLA and the Parent Collaborative.
It's only through great legal maneuvering of our lawyers and the pressure of public opinion that we’ve been given a public hearing and trial in the face inappropriate and unethical political interference into this judicial process by Mr. Parks, state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, and likely others. .
But Wednesday night is not about the politicians or the lawyers. Wednesday night is about you.
Wednesday night is a public hearing. It is your time for the Judge and the Commissioner to hear you either in words or through your presence.
There are 700 seats in Foshay Auditorium. Wednesday night is about you putting your name on one of those seats and committing yourself between now and then to making sure your neighbors, friends, co-workers and family put their names on the many other seats.
So what are you going to do on Wednesday night?
Will you help pack the Foshay Auditorium?
Will you stand with your South L.A. community, parents and teachers? We need you there.
Will you stand up for the safety of the Foshay and Dorsey children?
Will you stand up for justice against the MTA’s discriminatory design of the Expo Line that makes no child west of La Cienega walk across the tracks, while forcing thousands of our South L.A. children to walk across them EVERY DAY for the next 100 years?
The media will be there. What message do you want to send to those watching?
The Foshay Learning Center is at 3751 Harvard Blvd., Los Angeles 90018, one block east of Western and Exposition.
