He Travels a Rocky Route

You may see some unfriendly faces around Nick Patsaouras at the otherwise festive opening of the Los Angeles-Long Beach trolley line Saturday.

If so, Patsaouras has brought it on himself. You’ve heard of him. He’s the man who wants to build the West Coast Gateway, a monumental high-tech piece of art arching over the Hollywood Freeway, an idea as mad as some of the drivers who’d pass under it. But that’s not why people are unhappy with him.

Nick’s considered bad company because of the rough way he shouldered himself into the board presidency of the outfit that runs the rail commuter line, the famous--or infamous--Southern California Rapid Transit District. How he got there tells more about play-to-win board politics than you’ll learn from any of Saturday’s 21 speeches, five of them by Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman, who orates at each ceremonial stop.

Why anyone would want the full-time headaches connected to Patsaouras’ part-time job is hard to understand. We all know the RTD catalogue of horrors--late buses, on-board muggings, safety violations, graffiti, drug problems among drivers. And now we let them run the new trains?

At any rate, as you might guess from his Gateway proposal, Nick is not the usual faceless L.A. politician. Ever since he surfaced in local politics a decade ago, Patsaouras has stood apart from the pack. He is stubborn, ambitious, publicity mad--and tenacious.

Patsaouras is a restless, dark-haired man who speaks with the accent of his native Greece. He emigrated to the United States as a young man. After graduating from Cal State Northridge, he opened a successful engineering business in the San Fernando Valley. But Patsaouras likes politics best. In 1980, he ran for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in the 5th District, which includes most of the Valley.

He lost in the primary. But in the runoff Patsaouras, a pragmatic Democrat, endorsed the eventual winner, Republican Mike Antonovich, and the new supervisor paid Nick back by appointing him to the RTD board.

Patsaouras stepped into a mess. The RTD board is an amalgam of obscure City Council members, political friends and others appointed by elected officials such as Mayor Tom Bradley and the county supervisors. The staff really runs the place.

At first the bureaucrats, and even some board members, treated Patsaouras with contempt. A few privately made fun of his accent. But Patsaouras had his revenge. He challenged heavily favored board member Mike Lewis for the presidency. He organized Lewis’ enemies, and promised high visibility board jobs to his foe’s key supporters. That gave him a majority.

“They thought they could outsmart the Greek,” he told me afterward, satisfied.

After serving as president in the early 1980s--a tenure distinguished by his tenacious advocacy for subway funds and his badgering of the bureaucrats--Patsaouras remained on the board. This year, he decided to run for president again. As before, he wanted the board to control the staff.

He was mad at RTD General Manager Alan Pegg and Pegg’s board supporters for continuing a long feud with the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which is in charge of financing transit lines. He was worried about a drop on bus ridership from 1.8 million a year to 1.3 million in the last five years. He was concerned about the Pegg team’s ability to run the Blue Line, as the new new commuter rail is called.

“The Blue Line is a window of opportunity for the RTD,” Patsaouras said.

This time his opponent was Marv Holen, a lawyer and longtime board member who had learned his politics many years ago from one of California’s toughest, the late Jesse Unruh, former state treasurer and Speaker of the Assembly.

It was a highly competitive matchup between opposites. “Nick has a flamboyant style,” said Holen, “much more high profile than me.”

The two men hit the phones. Holen pulled together the votes of the board members who support Pegg. Patsaouras united the dissidents, and he won, 6 to 5.

Now, Patsaouras and his allies are planning to tell Pegg he’s out if the Blue Line has trouble or bus service doesn’t improve.

That’s why not everyone will be celebrating when the trains start to run. No matter how stirring the speeches, or tasty their lunch in Long Beach, General Manager Pegg, his top staff and their board allies will be worried sick about making sure the trains run on time. And what awaits them back at the office Monday if they don’t.