When community members crowd into a Metro meeting room next Thursday to argue for and against the proposed Dodger Stadium gondola, the board of directors will listen before they vote on whether to proceed with the project.
Will the directors speak?
In a public meeting, officials often explain their position on a high-profile issue. In the Metro meeting next week, the board of directors could vote on the gondola without any of the board members saying a word about it.
Metro released the meeting agenda late Tuesday night. The agenda includes the gondola vote as part of what public agencies call the consent calendar — that is, a package of items that can be approved with one vote, and without any discussion among the officials doing the voting.
The items on any consent calendar generally are routine. Based on a staff report, Metro considers the gondola approval to be routine too: Metro approved the gondola last year, a judge ordered fixes to the environmental impact report, and all Metro needs to do now is rubber-stamp the fixes. The gondola project still would need approvals from the Los Angeles City Council and various state agencies.
At a committee meeting last week — one week after the council had urged Metro to kill the project — Los Angeles Mayor and Metro board member Karen Bass put it this way: “Just real quickly, I just wanted to reiterate or clarify that what the vote is about today is about certifying the EIR, certifying the project’s environmental documents under CEQA, nothing more.”
Two other board members — county supervisors Janice Hahn and Hilda Solis — did address the concerns raised by the public speakers. Hahn voted no on the gondola; Solis voted yes.
Whether Hahn, Solis or any of the other 11 voting board members decide to speak up next Thursday remains to be seen. All it takes is one member to remove the item from the consent calendar and demand discussion on the issue.
The gondola, first pitched by former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt in 2018, would carry fans from Union Station to Dodger Stadium. Gondola proponents have not announced any financing commitments for a project with a construction cost estimated at $500 million and proposed as privately funded.
