delay

In the summer of 1957, Walt Disney spotted a monorail in Europe and decided he’d like to have one of his own. Design and construction began in 1958, and the following year, Disneyland had a monorail.

The LAX SkyLink people mover was approved by the L.A. City Council in 2018 and construction began in 2019, with a targeted completion date of 2023. In the latest news of yet another delay, the hoped-for startup has been pushed into next year.

Almost eight years, and the train has not left the station.

It’s the little engine that can’t.

The people mover that doesn’t.

There’s been finger-pointing, litigation and a grand jury probe into how a $1.9-billion choo-choo has become a $3.3-billion boondoggle.

Maybe they should have hired Disney.

“Tell me about it,” said Los Angeles City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who noted that Disney imagineer Bob Gurr, who helped design the monorail and other iconic Disneyland attractions, lives in her district.

I’m waiting to hear back from Gurr, who’s in his mid-90s, to see if he’s available to work a little magic and help get the people mover moving.

“I’m down with that,” Rodriguez said. “And we get an E Ticket ride.”

To fully appreciate the madness, a bit of historical context is helpful.

Given the region’s legendary traffic, a well-designed transit system has always made sense in Southern California, and billions of dollars have been invested, with quite a bit to show for voter-approved sales tax increases with Measures R and M and boatloads of federal dollars.

But the ride has been bumpy.

In the 1990s, the Green Line, as it was then known, was supposed to go to the airport.

It stopped two miles short.

The rail line known as the purple, or the D, was sometimes referred to as the Subway to the Sea.

But even if its next phase is ever completed, it would stop about 3.5 miles short of the beach. (You can, however, take the E Line to downtown Santa Monica.)

Meanwhile, as The Times’ Colleen Shalby just reported, construction is beginning this week on the Van Nuys-Pacoima light rail line.

Only five years behind schedule.

And the cost has gone from $1.3 billion originally to almost $4 billion.

Are you catching on to a pattern here?

And these are not rocket launches we’re talking about. A light rail line. A people mover.

We’re in California, which has a Silicon Valley and Silicon Beach and a few remnants of the aerospace industry, but we can’t get Joe Blow from the Hertz rental lot to an airport terminal in less than eight years?

Meanwhile, the Vision Zero plan introduced 11 years ago by then-Mayor Eric Garcetti, with a goal of eliminating traffic deaths with roadway design and safety improvements, has fallen far short. As Damian Kevitt of Streets Are for Everyone told Shalby, for three years running, L.A. has had more traffic fatalities than homicides.

“The rest of the world has seen a decrease in traffic deaths,” Kevitt told me. “There are ways to do this, and we run into roadblocks. … It’s lack of leadership … at every level. … To me, the people mover is almost an indicator of systemic issues across the city.”

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is the chair of Metro and appoints airport commissioners. So unsurprisingly, Councilmember Nithya Raman, her challenger in the mayoral campaign, is going after her on the people mover debacle and other transportation shortcomings.

Bass says the LAX project began before she took office, and regarding disputes that led to delays, “we pushed for a settlement so there would be a firm finish line.”

That’s weak.

There’s never been a firm finish line.

It’s like every other major public project in L.A. and beyond. They come with no firm starting time and no firm completion date, and the only two guarantees are that the tab will keep growing, and when the job finally is complete, public officials will take bows at the ribbon cutting.

So what happened in the case of the people mover?

The grand jury report goes into great detail about an arrangement in which L.A. World Airports awarded designing, building and operating authority to a private contracting consortium called LINXS, for LAX Integrated Express Solution.

Are you comfortable with that? Can you understand why anyone would be, other than the contractors?

The grand jury found no criminal activity on anyone’s part, but you’ll be shocked to know there was a considerable amount of eyebrow-raising behavior. The contractor has sued the city, blaming it for delays, but the grand jury suggested it was the contractor who caused the delays, essentially holding out for payment of $550 million in settlement claims.

It’s as if city officials, who missed out on having the project done in time for the World Cup matches, were easy marks, desperate to make sure the trains are running at least by the 2028 Olympics.

We could have flying taxis by then, but no airport locomotive. This would not be a good look.

Rodriguez, who initially voted no on the upcoming convention center expansion project, said she was explicit about one concern she had regarding that public-private partnership.

“Whatever contract language was in the people mover contract, make sure it’s not in the convention center project,” she said.

“This is an embarrassment, by all means,” said James Moore, emeritus engineering professor at USC.

Although the people mover — which would finally make it possible for rail passengers to connect to LAX — is only 2.25 miles long, it’s a sophisticated feat of engineering. But, as Moore noted, countless airports around the world have figured out how to get the job done.

“Should it have taken this long? No,” Moore said. But “when anything goes right in Los Angeles, that’s when I’m surprised.”

Paging Bob Gurr, Disney designer extraordinaire.

We need your help, Bob, and you can name your price.

Money appears to be no object.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

NEW YORK — Lawyers for the BBC say President Trump is trying to delay sitting for a deposition in the defamation case he brought against the British broadcaster until January 2027.

In a filing this week, they asked a Florida court to compel the president to appear in the $10 billion case after they say he canceled an agreed-upon date this week, citing “matters of national importance.”

“Two months of discovery remaining, the BBC still has not been able to depose, and does not even have a schedule to depose, the most central figure in this case: Plaintiff himself,” attorney Charles D. Tobin wrote in the filing. “Those delays have flouted the cooperative spirit of discovery and precluded the BBC from obtaining the evidence necessary to robustly litigate its defense.”

Trump, who has a history of avoiding depositions, filed the lawsuit against the BBC last December, seeking $10 billion in damages as he accused the British broadcaster of defamation as well as deceptive and unfair trade practices related to a documentary, “Trump: A Second Chance.”

Britain’s publicly funded national broadcaster admitted filmmakers spliced together quotes from different sections of the speech Trump delivered to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, before the storming of the U.S. Capitol, to make it seem like he was directly urging violence.

The 33-page lawsuit accused the BBC of broadcasting a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump,” calling it “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The broadcaster apologized to Trump over the edit and the head of the BBC and the British broadcaster’s top news executive both resigned. But the broadcaster has denied Trump’s claims that it defamed him.

In the filing this week, BBC lawyers said that they first requested dates for the deposition in July, and followed up repeatedly. Both sides, they said, eventually agreed on Oct. 16.

However, after weeks of silence, they wrote, “Plaintiff’s counsel responded on September 28, 2026, indicating that ‘the President is no longer available for his deposition on October 16 due to other matters of national importance’ and that counsel would ‘endeavor to provide you with a replacement date by the end of this week.’ He did not.”

Instead, they said, they were told last week that Trump “has no availability whatsoever for a deposition” before discovery is set to close on Dec. 18. and were told that Trump would instead make himself available the second or third week of January.

In a statement in response to the filing, a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team did not address the reasons for Trump’s delay, but repeated its allegations against the BBC and said the president was holding the broadcaster “accountable for its defamation and reckless election interference just as he has held other fake news mainstream media responsible for their wrongdoing.”

Trump voluntarily dropped a $500 million lawsuit he filed against his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen in 2023, days before he was set to give a deposition in that suit.

Colvin writes for the Associated Press.

PHOENIX — The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected Arizona’s eleventh-hour bid to block the upcoming start of a court-ordered takeover of healthcare operations in its prisons after the state was found to have provided constitutionally inadequate care to incarcerated people and dragged its feet for over a decade in making required improvements. Justice Elena Kagan denied the state’s request Thursday, leaving an outside corrections professional set to take over healthcare management for 25,000 incarcerated people on Oct. 19.

Arizona had asked the courts to delay the takeover while it appealed that decision and the appointment of former Ohio corrections director Annette Chambers-Smith to lead the effort. The state sought the delay from the Supreme Court after lower courts rejected by the request.

Over the past 14 years, Arizona has been dogged by complaints that its prison healthcare system was run shoddily and callously and that it repeatedly failed to improve a system found to have exposed prisoners to harm and preventable deaths.

Under a 2014 settlement, the state pledged to overhaul medical and healthcare services for prisoners but was soon accused of failing to make promised improvements. That led to more than $2 million in contempt-of-court fines and the eventual revocation of the agreement by U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver, who said corrections officials had shown little interest in making required changes.

After a 2021 trial, Silver ruled against the state, issuing an injunction that required corrections authorities to address the constitutional violations. Earlier this year, she ordered the takeover after concluding the state hadn’t gotten a semblance of compliance with court-ordered changes and the U.S. Constitution after more than a decade of litigation. Silver found that prisoners remained exposed to grave threats of harm and suffering because of systematic deficiencies in their health care.

The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday’s decision.

In a statement, Corene Kendrick, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represents prisoners in the lawsuit, applauded the court’s refusal to delay the takeover, also known as a receivership. She said Arizona fought accountability at every turn while prisoners suffered. “Today’s decision clears the way for a receiver to do what the state has failed to do for more than a decade,” Kendrick said.

In seeking a delay, Arizona’s attorneys said Silver adopted a drastic takeover remedy without first trying intermediate fixes to speed compliance. They also said the judge hadn’t given the corrections department enough time to continue making progress and argued that the official appointed to run healthcare operations wouldn’t be politically accountable. They said the agency is committed to improving health care in prisons, has made significant progress since 2023 and that the prisoners won’t suffer harm if the start of the takeover were delayed by a few months.

Lawyers for prisoners said the state was minimizing its noncompliance, disputed its claim it had not been given enough time to comply after 14 years of litigation and said Silver had already tried less-intrusive remedies. They also said the state’s proposal of a months-long delay in the takeover “grievously minimizes” the harm prisoners face from the state’s inability to provide adequate care.

Complaints about health care in Arizona’s prisons have spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations.

The lawsuit was filed in 2012 during Republican Gov. Jan Brewer’s administration and continued under Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, when both contempt fines against the state were issued. Under Ryan Thornell, the corrections director in Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs administration, the department has complained that its progress in overhauling health care operations in recent years hasn’t been acknowledged.

The lawsuit over healthcare for incarcerated people covers Arizona’s nine state-run prisons but not the nearly 10,000 Arizona inmates held in private prisons.

Billeaud writes for the Associated Press.