Keeping Metro Rail in the Soup

I have a confession.

When I was a government reporter--before I began to write this column--I covered a major dispute between two important public agencies in the Los Angeles area. One is the Southern California Rapid Transit District, which runs the bus system. The other is the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which is building trolley lines. They can’t agree on who should supervise the completion of the Metro Rail subway, which is now being dug through downtown and is scheduled, one day, to reach the San Fernando Valley.

This is my confession: I’ve written dozens of stories on the subject, but I’ve never been able to understand why the dispute goes on.

I’ve tried. I’ve written stories that have laid out plausible explanations. But I didn’t have much faith in them. The threads of the argument are too obscure, the issue itself too removed from the real-life concerns of the public.

Merely covering a hearing on this dispute can put you to sleep. Once, a colleague who works for a television station caught Mayor Tom Bradley sleeping at one of the hearings. It was evidence, the reporter felt, that the mayor was losing his fastball. No, I protested, it was just that the meeting was so irrelevant. I had also fallen asleep.

Neither the mayor nor I can be blamed. For this dispute is a perfect example of what’s wrong with local government in the Los Angeles Basin.

There are too many public agencies here, fighting over turf, too many agencies with cumbersome names, reduced in the press to an endless list of acronyms. Some are doing important work, others are not. Big and small, it’s impossible to keep them straight. When someone tries to figure out who is to blame for bad bus service or some other misery inflicted on the public, all they get is alphabet soup.

With all good intentions, the Legislature, in the 1960s, created the Southern California Rapid Transit District (SCRTD) to operate a regional bus system. It’s run by a board of directors appointed by the county supervisors and various municipal governments. Unhappy with the way the SCRTD was operating, the Legislature created another agency to supervise it. It was named the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (LACTC). Its board of directors is also appointed by the county supervisors and some city governments. The county transportation commission has considerable control over the rapid transit district’s spending. Members of the two boards are largely unknown to residents of the vast region they serve, except for a few who are on local city councils.

The audiences at their meetings are small, which isn’t unusual. Public meetings aren’t a hot ticket in this city. But some who attend are remarkably obsessive. One community activist threatens to organize mass marches on the boards. His voice gets loud, his face becomes pale and his gestures are dramatic enough to excite a prayer meeting. And always there are a half dozen or so gadflies. They specialize in budget and agenda minutiae, questioning small expenditures but never seeing the big picture.

Lately, the composition of the audiences has been changing, and perhaps this gets us to what is becoming most important about the dispute. A few well-dressed men and women sit in the back of the room, saying little but doing a lot of watching and listening. These are lobbyists for construction companies, transit equipment manufacturers and land developers.

With the availability of funds for light-rail lines and the Metro Rail subway, transit has become big business around here. Nobody cared when the only public transit was a rickety bus system, mostly used by the poor, the very elderly, the disabled and other disenfranchised. Now, big money is available for government contracts. A lot of landowners are becoming rich because their land is along the route of proposed new rail transit lines.

This has made the directors of the two transit districts very important people. They’re running big businesses, awarding multimillion-dollar contracts. They go on lobbying trips to Washington and Sacramento. They travel abroad to inspect transit systems.

You could call it psychic patronage. The rewards are more in the head than the bankbook. But it has the potential to be just as damaging as the more traditional kind of patronage.

Despite the new importance of the agencies and the frustrated efforts of reporters to explain them, the SCRTD and the LACTC remain safely lost in the jumble of alphabet soup. Protected by their obscurity, the directors continue to enjoy their psychic patronage and avoid settling their argument.