The Regional Connector has been beset by lawsuits since the day it was approved, and the lawsuits are still coming. The owners of the Japanese Village Plaza mall in Little Tokyo are suing Metro and the two construction companies building the Regional Connector, Skanska USA and Traylor Bros., to try to stop work immediately on the project, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The Regional Connector is a three-station, underground link through Downtown from Little Tokyo to the 7th Street/Metro Center station that would allow passengers to travel from points on the Gold Line to the Blue and Expo lines without having to transfer trains like they have to right now.
As an element of the subterranean network, the lawsuit says, construction workers will shoot "a concrete-like substance" into the soil under the Japanese Village in an attempt "to compensate for the settling that will occur during tunneling." This is a problem for the owners of the Village.
Crews plan to inject cement into the soil there to compensate for the settling that will occur during tunneling. That technique, known as grouting, is common on major construction projects.
But Metro has not secured the rights to the land that sits directly outside the tunnels but underneath the soil, according to Japanese Village’s request for a temporary restraining order.
The attorney representing the shopping center says that representatives for the contractors building the Regional Connector alerted Metro months ago that they hadn’t gotten the necessary permissions for the grouting, but, he claims, Metro decided to move forward anyway.
The lawyer also says Metro’s construction team already did some grouting on the western side of the mall, and that it disrupted some of the existing paving there.
This is the third lawsuit that the Japanese Village has filed against the Regional Connector project. It lost one and is awaiting an appeal on another.
Loading comments...