MTA chief wanted

Twelve years ago, when a Times reporter asked a top executive at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority whether he would apply for the then-open position as the agency’s head, he exclaimed, “Please Lord, not me. Who would want it?”

That was back when the MTA was the country’s most troubled big-city transit agency, wracked by political infighting among board members, out-of-control spending, serious cost overruns and engineering mistakes on the Red Line subway, and a punishing federal consent degree demanding that the agency improve its bus service at any cost. As the agency begins its search for a new leader, its circumstances could hardly be more different.

Outgoing MTA chief Roger Snoble, 63, who announced his pending retirement Wednesday after serving the longest term as CEO in the agency’s 15-year history, doesn’t deserve all of the credit for the improvements. They were started by Julian Burke, a corporate turnaround specialist brought in by then-Mayor Richard Riordan after the two top candidates turned down the job. Yet Snoble, who took over from Burke in 2001, did more than continue Burke’s progress; with a minimum of fuss or fanfare, he extricated the agency from the yoke of the consent decree, pushed for and won a badly needed fare hike, successfully advocated for a sales-tax increase to expand the transit system, and oversaw innovative experiments such as the Orange Line dedicated busway and a pilot project to test the viability of congestion pricing in Los Angeles.

Finding a new transit chief will be a lot easier today than it was in 1996, yet Snoble’s successor will still have one of the toughest jobs in the country. The head of the MTA has to be at once a technocrat, accountant and politician, as well-versed in transportation policy as in financial management -- and able to dodge the knives hurled at his or her back by warring politicians on the agency’s board who are far more interested in building transit projects in their districts than in doing what’s best for the county as a whole. Not only will the next MTA chief have to oversee billions in new spending following the passage of Measure R (the half-a-cent sales-tax increase passed in November), but he or she will have to persuade the board to finally address the agency’s long-term structural deficit, something neither Burke nor Snoble were able to accomplish.

Los Angeles County is about to embark on a major transit building spree, and it’s going to take a very strong manager to do it right. None but the nation’s best need apply.