On May 8, 2026, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) opened the first three stations of the D Line extension along Wilshire Boulevard. As recently recounted in the Los Angeles Times, the long-promised “subway to the sea” took sixty-five years of political, funding, and engineering challenges to bring to fruition. RMM is proud to have played a part in that history, having represented Metro in the litigation that cleared the project’s path under both California and federal environmental laws.

When the Metro Board of Directors certified the Final EIR for what was then called the Westside Subway Extension in April 2012, it selected the most studied route in modern Los Angeles transit planning. The chosen alignment placed the Century City station at Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars—a route that required running the tunnel beneath the corner of the Beverly Hills High School campus. The Final EIS/EIR (joint NEPA/CEQA document) showed that the alternative station location at Santa Monica Boulevard sat atop an active earthquake fault, and that any reasonable alignment to Constellation had to pass under structures on the school site. Certain Beverly Hills decision-makers did not see it that way.

Shortly after Metro certified the EIR, the Beverly Hills Unified School District (BHUSD) and the City of Beverly Hills each filed petitions for writ of mandate in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging that Metro had violated CEQA. The City added claims under Public Utilities Code section 30639, contending that Metro’s transit hearing on the Century City station denied it a fair opportunity to be heard. RMM attorneys Tiffany Wright and Laura Middleton, with the help of paralegal Bonnie Thorne, defended Metro through the trial and on appeal.

The Court of Appeal’s published opinion, Beverly Hills Unified School District v. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (2015) 241 Cal.App.4th 627, rejected each of the petitioners’ claims. First, the court held that Metro was not required to recirculate the Draft EIS/EIR after adding fault-investigation and tunnel-safety reports to the final document. The new information “merely confirmed” what the draft had already disclosed—that the Santa Monica Boulevard station was not viable and that Constellation station was. Second, the court upheld Metro’s construction air quality analysis, rejecting the argument that CEQA required Metro to utilize localized significance thresholds in addition to regional thresholds, and rejecting the related argument that the EIS/EIR required a separate quantitative public-health analysis. Lastly, the court held that Metro’s transit hearing satisfied the Public Utilities Code, that the City received a full and fair hearing, and that substantial evidence supported the Metro Board’s decision.

In parallel to the state case, BHUSD and the City sued the Federal Transit Administration in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, alleging that the EIS violated NEPA, Section 4(f) of the Department of Transportation Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Metro, represented by RMM, intervened to defend the project. Judge George H. Wu’s 2016 ruling sided with the agencies on the central question of whether Metro’s selection of station locations in Century City was reasonable, but ordered FTA to prepare a Supplemental EIS to fill discrete gaps in the seismic and air quality disclosures.

Construction work proceeded while the SEIS was prepared. After FTA and Metro completed the SEIS in late 2017, BHUSD challenged it, focusing this time on the choice of construction staging areas adjacent to the high school. In May 2020, Judge Wu rejected those challenges, holding that the agencies’ selection of the staging area was not arbitrary or capricious and denying BHUSD’s request for approximately $1 million in attorneys’ fees.

Read together, the state and federal cases illustrate how a determined opponent can litigate a major infrastructure project on the basis of environmental review and how a well-documented administrative record ensures agency success. The 2015 published decision, in particular, has become a regular citation regarding recirculation and air quality analyses under CEQA.

Sixty-five years is a long time to wait for a subway. As the Los Angeles Times article notes, Wilshire is the most densely populated corridor west of the Mississippi, and the line that opens this week will connect Koreatown to the Westside in about half the time it now takes by car. When the extension reaches UCLA and the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center next fall, it will form the backbone of a regional rail network that has been promised – and contested – since Governor Edmund Brown turned the first test drill in 1962. RMM is honored to have helped Metro defend the choices that ultimately led to its construction.