Bradley’s Allies Put Damper on Bus Fare Plan

If Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky is going to succeed with his populist plan to lower bus fares in Los Angeles, he will have to overcome opposition from allies of Mayor Tom Bradley and other city officials, it became clear Friday.

Yaroslavsky was overridden Friday in a move to have the fare subsidy proposal inserted into the mayor’s budget for next year. The defeat was handed to Yaroslavsky, a potential rival to Bradley in next year’s mayoral election, by friends of the mayor on the council’s Finance and Revenue Committee, which Yaroslavsky chairs.

The other members of the committee--Richard Alatorre and Robert Farrell--voted to leave Yaroslavsky’s plan out of the annual budget to be considered by the City Council sometime after Bradley returns from an overseas trip today.

In April, Bradley proposed a $2.9-billion budget for next year that allotted money for 400 new police officers and generally enriched the city’s street paving and other services.

Yaroslavsky, as the lead council member for financial matters, this week offered a counterproposal that would reduce the bus fare for RTD riders who board during rush hour within the city of Los Angeles to 50 cents. Besides the 35-cent cut in the bus fare, which he described as a partial solution to traffic congestion, Yaroslavsky would have added 150 more police officers than Bradley sought.

After two weeks of hearings on the budget plans, Alatorre and Farrell formed the majority Friday that voted, in a procedural move, to forward a slightly amended version of the mayor’s budget to the full council. Their version makes no mention of the Yaroslavsky bus fare plan.

The Alatorre-Farrell version of the budget also overrode Yaroslavsky on the issue of police overtime. Bradley’s budget provided $11 million for overtime in the coming year, and Yaroslavsky had proposed increasing the overtime fund by another $10 million above what Bradley asked. But Alatorre and Farrell would agree to raise the mayor’s figure by only $6.7 million.

‘Minority Report’

The Yaroslavsky version of the budget remains eligible for consideration by the full council as a “minority report” of the finance committee. But he will have to persuade council members to pay for the lower bus fares without the help of top city appointed officials, who testified this week that the program was too expensive and that they could not say with any authority that traffic congestion would significantly improve.

About half of the $20-million annual cost would come from the city’s general fund used to provide other services, and transit officials said it would be the first time that the city used its general fund to subsidize RTD bus fares.

Another $10 million a year would come from the special fund of money for transit purposes set up by voters who agreed to a half-cent increase in sales tax in Los Angeles County.