‘I have deep regret and I groan. . . . I feel anguish and remorse.’

Perhaps as much as any local political figure of recent times, former county Supervisor Baxter Ward hitched his career to the vision of a huge new rail mass-transit system for Los Angeles.

But rather than celebrate the long-awaited start of construction on the first phases of Los Angeles’ multibillion-dollar commuter rail network, Ward, who played a key role in making it all possible, is in mourning.

“I have deep regret and I groan. . . . I feel anguish and remorse,” said the 68-year-old former newscaster and muckraking politician in the rich, theatrical baritone that was his trademark.

Now retired and struggling to finish writing a murder mystery, Ward sees Los Angeles’ emerging mass-transit system as a train wreck of disjointed planning and parochial political interests. “I can’t believe we’ve wasted these years and hundreds of millions of dollars” studying and planning a rail system that still has not been finally approved, he said in a telephone interview from his home in the Tarzana hills.

“I see a collapse of the whole effort.”

Before being defeated in a bitter 1980 election, the controversial two-term supervisor had something considerably grander in mind--a 232-mile system that would have placed high-speed trains on freeways and feeder trolleys along flood control channels.

“If you saw how logical it could have been. . . ,” Ward said, referring to his “Sunset Coastline system.”

Spurred in part by a flowering tax revolt, voters soundly rejected Ward’s dream in 1976. “I had a disaster on my hands,” Ward recalled, describing his ill-fated, one-man crusade for the Sunset Coastline system as “the single most difficult thing I have ever done in my life.”

Before leaving office, Ward played a lesser known but crucial role in crafting the financial mechanism that has made construction of Metro Rail and a connecting network of light-rail lines possible. In 1980, Ward’s ally, Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, needed Ward’s vote to get a sales tax increase for transit on the ballot. Ward went along, hoping to salvage at least some of his Sunset Coastline plans, on the condition that part of the funds be set aside for commuter rail lines.

The tax increase was approved and Ward had helped create an inviolate pot of money for future rail construction. “I regret it,” Ward said recently.

Street-level light-rail lines--like those being built between Los Angeles and Long Beach--are too slow, he said. And the $3.8-billion downtown-to-North Hollywood Metro Rail subway system will sop up huge amounts of money but serve relatively few commuters, he contended. Recent route selection setbacks in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside have shown that rail lines proposed to run along developed residential and commercial streets may never get anywhere, he said.

While he sometimes gets a “terrible twinge” to return to politics, Ward said he probably will not--in part because his refusal to take more than nominal campaign contributions makes it almost impossible to win.

Anyway, he’s been consumed by another personal crusade--battling with the city of Los Angeles over damage to his property that he says occurred during construction of a storm drain.

He has also been occupied with an as yet unsold novel, now in its fifth rewriting, based on Proposition 13. “It has been as unsuccessful as any of my transit efforts,” he said.