The Metro Board of Directors meets on Thursday at 9 a.m. at Metro headquarters adjacent to Los Angeles Union Station in downtown L.A. As usual, the meeting is open to the public. You can also listen online.
The 13-member Board is comprised of elected officials and their appointees from around Los Angeles County. The Board oversees the agency and makes the final decisions on policy and contracting.
Among some of the more interesting items to be considered at Thursday’s meeting:
•A parking ordinance that would give Metro the legal right to impose parking fees at Metro lots and would raise the daily parking fee at Union Station from $6 to $8. Point of emphasis: nothing has been decided yet on whether to impose fees.
•Approving a budget of $30-million for a project to install pedestrian gates at 27 intersections along the Blue Line — including gates on the Union Pacific side of the alignment.
•Adopting official names for the stations along the Crenshaw/LAX Line that is currently under construction. The names, from north to south: Expo/Crenshaw, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leimert Park, Hyde Park, Fairview Heights, Downtown Inglewood, Westchester and Aviation/Century. There is also a motion to change Westchester to Westchester/Veterans.
•A motion designed to encourage more cities who pursue bikeshare on their own to use the vendor chosen by Metro for the regional bikeshare program. There is also a separate motion to accelerate the regional bikeshare program to locations outside downtown L.A. — including the Westside — to no later than the end of 2017.
•A motion asking Metro to conduct a study on how best to resume operations of Angels Flight in downtown L.A.; the funicular has been closed for several years due to a regulatory issue. Please note that Angels Flight is a nonprofit and is not operated by Metro.
•An update to Metro’s joint development policy. Two key updates would require that 35 percent of all residential units developed on Metro-owned land qualify as affordable housing and that Metro could give a discount to developers who agree to include affordable units.
•Consider a contract for design and construction of a new subway vehicle maintenance facility at the Red Line yards in the Arts District. In addition, the Board will consider a motion to establish a Design Advisory Committee for the facility to help resolve ongoing concerns by the Arts District about the facility interfering with new open space planned near the Sixth Street Viaduct.
Links to staff reports on these items and others are included in the above agenda.
