Off the Track on Metro Rail

One public transportation agency in Los Angeles County has muscled its way into a position of some authority over the other. The price of this leveraged buy-in is estimated at $120 million, a bill that will be paid by taxpayers and riders on the Los Angeles Metro Rail project. Before the damages go higher, the Legislature, which created both agencies, must find out how they got out of control, and do whatever it takes to get them back in line.

The Legislature is the only hope because neither the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission nor the board of the Southern California Rapid Transit District is more than nominally accountable to anyone except itself, least of all to voters. No third party in the region has the credentials to vouch for either side in a squabble that reduces a very serious matter to charges that sound like a schoolyard argument during kindergarten recess.

There is, for example, no outside verification of an audit that the transportation commission said found construction of Metro Rail two years behind schedule and $135 million over budget. The RTD, which is in charge of construction, denies this, but there is no way to vouch for the denial, either.

Neither is there a way for Southern California voters to know whether it made sense for the transportation commission to leverage itself into shared control of the next phase of Metro Rail construction by holding up funds that the RTD needed to keep the first phase going. But voters do have one piece of damning evidence with which to make a fairly good guess about whether the commission ought to share control of anything: an estimate that construction delays caused by the commission’s maneuvering will add $120 million to the cost of Metro Rail. And that figure comes from the commission itself.

The Legislature created the commission with the best intentions. It wanted an agency that was not attached to any particular transportation system to parcel out public funds among road and rail networks in ways that would produce the best return for riders. But time and the instinct to accumulate power have soured those intentions.