PLAYING HER TRUMP CARD
The Beverly Hills heiress hobnobbing with Ivanka Trump at a Republican soiree last summer should have been at the height of her social powers.
Lisa Korbatov’s parents made a fortune redeveloping Los Angeles’ Garment District and were donors to Republican and pro-Israel causes. Korbatov herself was president of the Beverly Hills school board and a trustee of the Jewish Community Foundation, and her local political activism had received swooning coverage from the local press.
But Korbatov, 54, also has become an object of derision in some palm-shaded pockets of Beverly Hills. For eight years, she has led what passed for a heroic cause in auto-centric Southern California: fighting to derail L.A.’s nascent subway system, specifically a planned nine-mile, $8.2 billion subway extension that would tunnel under Korbatov’s alma mater, Beverly Hills High School.
Korbatov believes the subway poses a dire threat to the school and the surrounding enclave of wealth and celebrity. And so, from her perch on the school board, she has done all she can to stop it.
She’s warned that students could be poisoned or given cancer by seeping fumes, or incinerated by exploding underground gases, because the subway will run through the old oil fields that lie beneath much of West L.A. Kids might be targeted by terrorists attracted by the subway line, she has suggested. Perhaps the school itself will be accidentally demolished by a subterranean construction accident while the tunnel is being built, she has claimed.
“You will not succeed, and we will stop you at every turn,” Korbatov warned subway boosters on the day in 2012 that the route was approved.
But LA Metro, the region’s transit agency, has successfully rolled through the obstacles thrown in the way of its development track. The agency
