This meeting is in the Valley.

The 405 between the San Fernando Valley and Westwood is the country's most congested stretch of freeway. It is so bad that little more needs to be said. You know something needs to be done about it. And at long last, the Los Angeles Metro has been working on an alternative to the 405—a long-needed public transit connection.

The Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association and the Beverly Hills Mansionowners want to force the Metro Board to choose a—no joke—monorail instead of modern, automated heavy rail. Their argument? They don't want their property values to go down. This is, of course, an insult. The further insult is that the Board is considering this.

Both monorail options—Alternatives 1 and 3—would have abysmal ridership, pitiful capacity, and extremely slow speeds. They will deprioritize UCLA in favor of a metro station at the Getty.

Alternatives 4 and 5 would run automated heavy rail along Sepulveda Boulevard in the Valley before tunneling under the Santa Monica Mountains. They would have an underground station at the current UCLA Transit Center before continuing south to connect to the D Line on Wilshire and the E Line on Expo.

Alternative 6 would run traditional heavy rail (similar to the B Line) underneath Van Nuys Boulevard before continuing on the same path as 4 and 5.

Who is more important, the thousands of UCLA students, faculty, and staff, or the tourists and artists attending the Getty? Let's be real. This is a desperate attempt to avoid tunneling for petty, capitalistic, and unscientific reasons. We have been here before. For these same reasons, the Hollywood Hills and Laurel Canyon homeowners tried to block the B Line from going to North Hollywood in the 1990s. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

This movement to steal this vital piece of infrastructure from Los Angeles is being thrust forward by money, lies, and landlords. The ex-CEO of Ticketmaster, Fred Rosen, has made killing this project his primary focus throughout his retirement in the hills. We are socialists. These are people whom we are built to fight against. So let's do it. With our Angeleno siblings, we need to be seen and heard so they know we are on their side, not the side of the mansionowners.

The Board is so overwhelmed with corporate and capitalist influence that it is considering a secret seventh alternative: No Build. If they choose this, nothing, absolutely nothing, will be built to connect the Valley to the Westside. This choice would damage untold numbers of Angelenos and steal this vital piece of infrastructure from us completely.

Five public education and comment meetings will occur in the last week of May. These meetings were previously scheduled for the beginning of April and were rescheduled last minute under suspicious circumstances. Similarly, these new meetings were scheduled only two weeks in advance.

We need to organize to make sure the powers that be cannot keep us quiet and out of the conversation.

FIVE meetings are available—two in the Valley, two in the Westside, and one on Zoom.

Transit advocacy organizations and individual Angelenos plan to attend these meetings, so we will not be alone. We need to be there to join in the movement. Socialism is for the working class, and the working class needs us.

In Solidarity,
David James Henry