A Long Ride for the ‘Father of the Blue Line’ : Politics: Supervisor Kenneth Hahn fought for decades to bring back trolley service. His proposal to seek half-cent sales tax hike to fund the system put L.A. back on track.

Ever since the Red Cars stopped running in 1961, politicians talked about reviving a version of the trolleys in Los Angeles County. But there were disputes over the routes and financing--and years passed without action.

Whenever politicians turned to the public for money, they got turned down. County voters in 1968, 1974 and 1976 rejected transit taxes.

Nonetheless, Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who rode the Red Cars as a boy, remained committed to bringing back trolleys to his transit-dependent South-Central Los Angeles district. “I said I have to show my voters what I am able to deliver to them,” recalled Hahn, a member of the board since 1952.

In 1980, Hahn asked his fellow county Transportation Commission members to put on the ballot a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for transit.

“No one thought he had a chance,” Supervisor Ed Edelman recalled, noting that Hahn’s proposal came just two years after passage of the tax-cutting Proposition 13.

The tax was a tough sell, Hahn said in a recent interview. On the last day for placing a measure on the 1980 ballot, he had to recess the commission meeting a number of times to cut deals for votes. To win the support of commission representatives of small cities, he amended his proposal to allocate a share of the tax revenues to municipalities.

To avoid parochial squabbling, he included in the ballot measure a map showing that funds would go to the construction of lines throughout the county. Finally, Hahn proposed using a large chunk of revenues from the tax increase to lower bus fares--a step the supervisor said was essential to appeal to voters.

The strategy paid off. Commissioners decided to put the measure on the ballot--by a one-vote margin.

Hahn took charge of the campaign to win voter approval. He raised funds. He sometimes went to bus stops to urge riders to vote for the transit tax. The measure, Proposition A, was approved with 54% of the vote. It later survived a court challenge.

Hahn then lobbied to get the Los Angeles-Long Beach line built first. He said he took transportation commissioners to the top of City Hall to show them it was the only route with an open right of way. He argued that it could be built faster and cheaper than other routes.

“We have wasted too many years and too much money on studies for expensive subways and monorails and other costly ideas when we already have a transit system that is only growing weeds when it should be moving people,” Hahn told the commission in September, 1981.

The Los Angeles-Long Beach route also had powerful political allies. Supporting it were then Democratic Assemblyman Bruce Young of Cerritos, who chaired the Assembly Transportation Committee, and then-Caltrans Director Adriana Gianturco, a rail enthusiast who served under Gov. Jerry Brown.

When the successful San Diego-to-Tijuana trolley, built for about $86 million, became operational in 1981, the pressure increased to get something similar quickly running in Los Angeles. Young authored a bill allowing Caltrans to purchase portions of the Los Angeles-Long Beach rail right of way and begin engineering for its own project.

County officials in 1981 were warned that if they did not begin a project quickly, they would lose millions in state transit dollars.

Critics argued at the time that these factors weighed so heavily on the minds of commissioners that they proposed the light-rail line as a matter of political expediency rather than good planning.

“They are doing it because they have some money and they have to spend some money on rail and this is an area that is politically desirable,” then-Los Angeles Planning Director Calvin Hamilton said in 1982.

Edelman, who is now chairman of the County Transportation Commission, said that the Los Angeles-Long Beach line “was sold to us (as) the quickest and least costly.”

Hahn recalled that he argued the Blue Line would be a “faith line to show people we can deliver mass transit.”

On March 24, 1982, the county Transportation Commission gave the green light for the Los Angeles-Long Beach line.

Last week, Hahn was conspicuous among the politicians shaking hands and mugging for the cameras at a preview ceremony for the Blue Line, marking Los Angeles’ historic return to rail transit.

“He’s the father of this,” said RTD President Nick Patsaouras.