delay

WASHINGTON — A federal judge late Thursday blocked the Trump administration from breaking ground on a towering memorial arch for 14 days.

The temporary restraining order by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan halting the work represents a major setback for one of President Trump’s most prominent projects in his vision to remake Washington.

The decision followed a series of steps taken earlier Thursday by the government, including the final approval of the arch by the National Capital Planning Commission in an 8-4 vote after a 9 ½ hour hearing where scores of witnesses opposed the construction.

The administration said the work could begin as soon as the approval and the Interior Department issued a final decision authorizing construction and the proper notification was published by the National Park Service.

In approving the temporary stop, Chutkan said Virginia and the District of Columbia had shown that the immediacy of the construction would cause real harm to the plaintiffs.

“The harm is certain,” she wrote. “Defendants initially notified the court that construction could begin as early as November 5, 2026, if the NCPC approves the project at its meeting that day and the Department of the Interior authorizes construction.” In their filing, Virginia and D.C. warned of traffic pattern distortions as well as concerns about the impact on mutual aid emergency calls if the arch were to proceed.

“Second, the District and Virginia will incur significant unrecoverable costs. As soon as construction begins, DDOT will need to expend staff time and operating resources to affirmatively and proactively manage temporary detours, crashes or disabled vehicles,” Chutkan wrote.

The judge ordered the government to provide a status report next Monday to ensure they are complying with the order.

The judge’s decision came just over an hour after the National Capital Planning Commission hearing ended. The vote by the commission broke along federal and local lines. Those in favor work for the administration or are connected to the president, who was pushing for the immediate construction. Opponents represented the city of Washington.

The remote, call-in hearing — which crashed repeatedly in the first few hours and was accompanied by a nearly universally negative comment section — drew witnesses who gave impassioned comments opposing an arch they said will destroy the solemnity of the nearby Arlington National Cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of fallen service members and military veterans are buried.

The panel’s Trump-appointed chairman launched the meeting with a gushing appraisal of the towering monument and lauded Trump for wanting to build it.

“President Trump understands as president and a superb builder that it’s important to our national identity to display who we are through grand monuments,” said Mark Paoletta, the commission’s chairman.

As Trump has often remarked, “the great cities around the world have arches: Paris, Rome, London,” said Paoletta, who also serves as general counsel for the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Commissioner Paul Ingrassia, a lawyer for the General Services Administration, said the arch was “not about politics. It’s about remembrance. It’s about celebrating our history. It’s about commemorating veterans. And it’s really something that’s a noble tribute to our nation and something that we can all rally behind.”

But D.C. City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who also serves on the planning panel, said the project has not received required approval from Congress, nor has Congress appropriated any money for it. The plan submitted to the commission does not include a reference to military use cited by Trump and other administration officials, Mendelson said.

“We cannot approve final site and building plans until we have the final site and building plans,” he said.

The commission oversees construction on federal land in the city and began reviewing the arch plan in June.

The arch is one of several projects around Washington that the Republican president has undertaken as he alters the capital to his tastes — from renovating one of its storied public golf courses to threatening to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Those projects could soon face intense scrutiny after Democrats gained control of Congress in the midterm elections this week.

Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat who is set to chair the House Natural Resources Committee, called the project ill-advised and illegal.

“This arch would dishonor America,” Huffman told the commission. He called the proposed arch “a tribute to Donald Trump,” not veterans as Trump administration officials claim. The monument is similar to those built for emperors or kings, Huffman said, adding that Trump was using veterans as a pretext to build a memorial to himself.

Other critics, including the plaintiffs, argue that the Trump administration must seek congressional approval. The administration maintains that Congress cleared the way for a monument at Memorial Circle decades ago.

Several members of the Planning Commission used that logic in approving the project. Paoletta said it was a “national disgrace” that a memorial arch had not been placed there, despite a 1925 law that designated such a memorial, he said.

Chutkan rejected that argument in her ruling: “The sheer improbability that a 100-year-old statute would contain authority, unknown to every previous administration, to erect a 250-foot arch at a principal location in the Nation’s capital indicates how far defendants must stretch to justify this project.”

Daly and Fields write for the Associated Press. AP videographer Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.

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.