Country Club Lane

| Download

Oct. 25, 2009

Property tax protests are legendary in California. One of the earliest battles was over a tax to build the street we now know as Olympic. The opposition? Folks who lived near Country Club Lane. KPCC’s Kitty Felde says it’s another Street Story.

Kitty Felde: LA needed a better way to get to Santa Monica. City planners decided to make Tenth Street a hundred feet wide. To pay for construction, they taxed property owners three blocks north and south of the street. Matt Roth of the Auto Club says that’s where the trouble started.

Matt Roth: What happened was a group of homeowners sued. The case went all the way to the state Supreme Court.

Felde: The homeowners won.

Roth: At this point, some city council members said, “Well, let’s just redraw it and wiggle it around so that the people who don’t want it don’t have to have it.”

And that’s why Olympic Boulevard narrows and takes a jog to the south at Country Club Lane. In fact, that’s where Olympic disappears and reverts to its original name: Tenth Street.


Comments disabled after 14 days