Dear Neighbors and Friends,

Please don’t send money; we need your engagement! If you know anyone in the press/media, please let them know about this David & Goliath fight to preserve our neighborhood!

We are inviting you to join us for our community-led meeting on Sunday, September 14th, 2025 at 1 PM, out in the grass of the William Green Park in Lawndale.

This is not a Metro meeting! We have asked Metro many times to hold a public meeting before certifying the Final Environmental Impact Report, and they have refused. Metro also refused to let the City of Lawndale do soil toxicity tests along the track, stating that they would do this AFTER the project is approved. 🤔

However, depending on the level of toxicity in the soil—which will bring toxic dust directly outside of our windows as they dig up the old tracks—combined with how  unprecedentedly close this construction will be to family homes, there are very few examples of the necessary mitigation required to keep the community safe. This enhanced mitigation could ultimately add millions to the projects cost estimate, and therefore should have been more carefully fleshed out in the environmental impact report. 

…And then there are Lawndale’s many underground petroleum pipes, which go to the refinery, the airport, and the Air Force Base. These would need to be dug up and shifted over, and likely repositioned dangerously close to the tracks, where electrochemical erosion will be more dangerous. Metro’s planning in this regard is inadequate and non-transparent.

Metro “recognizes” the necessity for pipeline mitigation resources in Lawndale but the full financial and staffing requirements are still under development and not yet transparently published! 

Metro‘s engagement with our community has been little more than performative, including last-minute rubber-banding of confusing flyers to our fences, rather than mailing updates explaining—in layman’s terms—what is actually going on. This, of course, is by design.

So our community is stepping up to make sure residents have the chance to be informed and heard.

What we’ve found is that the majority of people are still confused or uninformed about what Metro is planning.That’s why this meeting is so important. If you have questions about the project, bring them to the meeting. We will have people there to answer them, and Spanish interpreters will be available.

Also, the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) has been released this week, showing that Metro has chosen the wrong route for this project. We will have updated information about that at the meeting. 

Additional clarification has led us to believe they will be bringing the FEIR to the Metro Board of Directors' meeting not in September, but potentially in October or December. That gives us some additional time to get people on the free bus and to the meeting. This is great news, as we need all the time we can get to review the document, share the information, and get people on the free bus and to that meeting to make sure our voices are heard.

📅 Community Meeting
1 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 14, 2025
📍 William Green Park, Lawndale

You can also let the Metro Board Chair Dutra know how you feel about this injustice:  fdutra@cityofwhittier.org