Frank McCourt proposed gondola from From Union Station to Dodger Stadium On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted to urge Metro to kill the project.
The resolution, approved by a 12-1 vote, does not itself constitute any formal decision. It won't go into effect unless Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass agrees, and Bass previously voted for the project as a Metro board member.
But it makes clear that a City Council vote to approve the project, expected next year, could be an increasingly difficult hurdle for McCourt and his allies to overcome.
“This resolution tells Metro that the City of Los Angeles refuses to be bought by shiny images and empty promises,” Councilwoman Eunisse Hernandez, whose district includes Dodger Stadium, told her colleagues at Wednesday’s council meeting.
Not a single council member spoke in favor of the gondola.
The project requires approval from the council, the state parks agency and Metro, which approved the project's environmental impact report last year. The court ordered that two flaws in the report be corrected, and Metro plans to vote next month on whether to approve the revised report.
The resolution approved Wednesday calls on Metro to reject the revised report and “deny re-approval of the project.”
McCourt, a former Dodgers owner and still co-owner of Dodger Stadium parking lots, first installed the gondola in 2018 and later said fans would ride for free. The projected construction cost is approximately $500 million; none of the private funding promised was publicly disclosed.
“This project is an affront to our communities, and this process has become an affront to our collective intelligence,” Hernandez said.
Opponents of the project — and the resolution itself — cite, among other things, that 160 trees from the beloved park would be permanently removed to make way for the gondola, and that a UCLA study projects that traffic at Dodger Stadium will not decrease by even 1%.
In a letter to board members, the board of directors of Zero Emissions Transit, the nonprofit organization responsible for funding and operating the gondola, called on the board to reject what it called “serious inaccuracies and misleading statements.”
The letter states that 160 trees will be temporarily removed and then restored, and 480 trees will be added. The UCLA study retracted its findings, the letter also said, based on “biased data provided by individuals associated with the project's opposition groups.”
ZET spokesman Nathan Click said, “We continue to move forward with all approval processes: metro, city, state.”
