The Beverly Hills school board took another step during its July 10 meeting to oversee subway construction through the campus.

Construction on Metro’s Purple Line Extension project has been making its way down Wilshire Boulevard for years. (photo by Luke Harold)

The board voted unanimously to approve a contract with Geo Instruments to provide perimeter dust, vibration and sound monitoring at Beverly Hills High School. Data collected will be stored and accessed by the district’s legal team. The value of the contract is a maximum of $39,894.

The city of Beverly Hills has also been working with Metro to mitigate the effects of construction as the Purple Line Extension project moves through the school district and city.

“It would be good for us to share with the city that we are making this purchase, that we are investing in this so there’s some coordination,” school board member Isabel Hacker said.

She requested a report to the board about communication between the two sides.

Section 2 of the Purple Line project will extend the rail into Beverly Hills and Century City, with new Wilshire/Rodeo and Century City/Constellation stations. The $6.3 billion project will ultimately extend the subway to Westwood.

The district has an ongoing lawsuit that was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division, arguing that Metro has not adequately accounted for the potential health and safety concerns for students. The legal battle has also played out in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Los Angeles County Superior Court. In a 2016 decision, Metro had to submit additional environmental reports, but the planned route was allowed to remain intact. The latest pending lawsuit by the district challenges those reports, and district officials have said they want to prevent the tunnel alignment from going underneath the high school.

Metro has repeatedly said it can safely build the portion of the tunnel that goes under the high school.

Besides the concerns over effects on students and faculty, the district also altered plans for parking at the high school due to Metro’s construction. Approximately one-fifth of Measure BH, a $385 construction bond that appeared on the June 5 ballot and passed, has been budgeted for parking at the high school. The bond is primarily for facility upgrades throughout the district, but the largest budgeted item in the project list is $85 million for the parking. It was determined that the proximity between its originally planned parking project and Metro’s Purple Line Extension tunnel alignment would have been too close for the district to secure the approvals it needed.

For the past number of years, Purple Line construction has made its way down Wilshire Boulevard within close proximity of businesses and residences. It’s scheduled to be completed in 2026, in time for the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.

Construction on the city’s new Wilshire/Rodeo station began last fall with utility relocation. Beverly Hills residents expressed their concerns about factors such as traffic impacts and the aesthetics of public spaces near construction sites.

Metro is responsible for constructing sound walls that are at least 20 feet high around the staging yards located at the southwest corner of Wilshire and Reeves, and at the northeast corner of Wilshire and Canon, based on a memorandum of agreement between the city and Metro. The city will cover the walls with banners that include way-finding and public information, images and graphics about Beverly Hills and Metro.

“Metro has always taken the position that they will mitigate, but we wouldn’t know what to have them mitigate if we don’t have the numbers through data,” school board member Mel Spitz said. “So it’s good to have the data.”