Posted: July 18th, 2005

July 18, 2005

Chairman Joseph E. Petrillo and
Members of the Board
California High Speed Rail Authority
Mehdi Morshed, Executive Director
925 L Street, Suite 1425
Sacramento, CA 95814

Re: Avoid Severe and Unnecessary Impacts against the People, the Los Angeles River, and State Parks; Adopt “Corridor for Further Study” for High-Speed Rail; and Implement Community Benefits Agreement

Dear Chairman Petrillo, Members of the Board, and Mr. Morshed:

We submit these comments to express our serious concerns regarding the proposed preferred alignment for high-speed rail that would severely and unnecessarily impact the people in the surrounding communities, the Río de Los Angeles State Park at Taylor Yard, the Los Angeles State Historic Park at the Cornfield, and the Los Angeles River. The California High-Speed Rail Authority (“HSRA”) presented the proposed preferred alignment on June 25, 2005.

We urge the HSRA to defer selection of a preferred alignment through the San Fernando Valley and Northeast Los Angeles to Union Station. We urge instead that HSRA formally designate this area as a corridor for further study, analogous to the recommendation for the Northern Mountain Crossing between San Jose and Merced, for consideration of other feasible and less discriminatory alternatives in the region. This will allow the community, stakeholders, and public officials a full and fair opportunity to assess and comment on severe and unnecessary impacts on the people, the Parks, and the River. The people in the surrounding communities are disproportionately Latinos and Asians and low income. We also urge HSRA to work with the community, stakeholders, and public officials to develop a community benefits agreement to ensure the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of any high speed rail.

For over a decade, residents and stakeholders have worked to create a series of recreational, historical, cultural, and environmental resources along the Los Angeles River in one of the most park-poor urban regions in the nation.

The California Department of Parks and Recreation has documented the environmental justice impacts against the people, the Parks, and the River:

Proposed alternative HST corridors impacting both the Taylor Yard and Cornfield properties clearly raise the environmental justice issue.

The children of the Cornfield/Taylor Yard community are disproportionately low income children of color. The community within a five mile radius of the Cornfield is 68% Latino, 14% Asian, 11% non-Hispanic white, and 4% African-American with thirty percent of the population below poverty level as compared to 14% for the State of California as a whole. Within five miles of the Cornfield there are 282,967 children and 235,000 children within five miles of Taylor Yard.

Yet, to serve this population, Los Angeles has fewer acres of parks per thousand residents than any major city in the United States, having less than one acre of park per thousand residents. The National Recreation and Park Association standard is ten acres per thousand population. Compare this standard to the 0.9 acres per thousand in the community surrounding Cornfield and the 0.3 acres of parks per thousand residents surrounding Taylor Yard (one of the least park-served areas in Los Angeles) with the 1.7 acres in disproportionately white and relatively wealthy parts of Los Angeles.

The California Department of Parks and Recreation recognizes that the Greater Los Angeles Region is an area that is under-served in regard to park facilities and that many of the area’s residents, particularly those least able to afford it, are either unaware of, or feel isolated from, state and federal parklands and recreational facilities. This Department on behalf of the people of the State of California has invested $78,000,000 in the purchase of the Taylor Yard/Cornfield properties in this decade specifically to address these disparities. This effort will be undone unless alternative routing or a fully subterranean system is chosen to bypass all impacts to these properties.

Comments submitted by California Department of Parks and Recreation, August 19, 2004 (emphasis added). The Center for Law in the Public Interest submitted comments on behalf of a diverse alliance addressing the environmental justice impacts on the people, the Parks, and the River on August 31, 2004. We incorporate the relevant analyses here. The comments are attached and are available at http://clipi.org/pdf/comments-highspeed.pdf.

We urge HSRA to work with community and political leaders to develop a community benefits agreement that will ensure the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of any high speed rail in this region. Two of the central lessons of the environmental justice movement are that people of color and low income communities disproportionately suffer from environmental degradation, and are disproportionately denied the benefits of public works projects including jobs, small business opportunities, and other public goods. HSRA can learn to do better drawing on decades of lessons from public work projects in Los Angeles, from the proposed modernization of Los Angeles World Airways (LAWA), to the construction of the Century Freeway, to construction and modernization of public schools. The community benefits agreement at LAWA currently offers $500 million in benefits to impacted communities. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s public school construction program will create 174,000 jobs and $9 billion in wages. The District has targeted small businesses and local workers to ensure they receive a fair share of theses benefits. The Century Freeway litigation resulted in job creation, creation of affordable housing, and environmental benefits including public transit.

We urge HSRA to defer selection of a preferred alignment through the San Fernando Valley and Northeast Los Angeles to Union Station and instead formally designate this area as a corridor for further study, and to work with community leaders to implement a community benefits agreement for any high speed rail in the region.

Very truly yours,

Robert García
Center for Law in the Public Interest

Carol Jacques
North East Progressive Alliance

Cc: Los Angeles City Council Ad Hoc Committee on the Los Angeles River
Ruth Coleman, Director, California Department of Parks and Recreation
Ted Jackson, Director of Operations, California Department of Parks and Recreation