Mass Transit Is No Fast Solution for Area Jobless, Economists Say : Manufacturing: A proposal to create a new industry by attracting rail and bus builders faces an uphill battle. Critics see it as a long-term prospect at best.

Although building rail cars and buses may offer some long-term hope for Los Angeles County’s beleaguered manufacturing sector, some experts say such transit work promises little quick relief to the area’s thousands of unemployed aerospace and auto workers.

The money is there, as Southern California expects to spend about $140 billion on transit improvements over the coming 30 years. But the region faces an uphill battle to translate that investment into many new local manufacturing jobs, several economists and transit officials said.

The proposal to create a regional mass-transit industry surfaced last week in Van Nuys at a meeting of political leaders, including Mayor Tom Bradley and Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar). The session was spurred by General Motors’ announced plans to close its 2,600-worker Van Nuys car plant next year.

However, economists and transit officials say a variety of factors--competition from other parts of the country and the world, the region’s perceived anti-business attitude, and a lack of transit-related manufacturers locally--make the plan a long-term prospect at best.

“Your durable goods manufacturing segment in Los Angeles County has been dropping like a rock,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist for Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County, a private group that works to promote local job and business development.

“Right now we’re fighting to keep more people from losing their jobs,” he said.

Talk by politicians about finding new job options for workers in the region’s eroding aerospace and auto industries fails to reflect the struggling economy, Kyser said. “The job market is pretty dismal. You’re looking at an extended period of unemployment for a lot of these people.”

General Motors’ decision to close its Van Nuys operation--Southern California’s last major automobile manufacturing plant--is just the latest in a series of manufacturing losses for the county in recent years. The aerospace industry has been a big part of that decline.

Aerospace employment fell by more than 40,000 in the last four years, from 301,000 jobs in 1986 to about 260,000 last year. And Kyser said another 25,000 jobs may be lost this year as companies such as Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas move operations out of state.

Against that backdrop, officials at the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which will oversee much of the region’s massive future transit spending, said their initial goal is to attract one bus-building plant, employing perhaps 500 workers, within the next several years.

Travis Montgomery, the commission’s new economic development specialist, said chances appear slim of attracting a company to build cars for the Metro Rail subway or Los Angeles-to-Long Beach light-rail line, mainly because the region will not generate demand for enough cars to justify a factory.

It is no longer even a choice of buying U.S.-made versus foreign rail cars, because all major rail car manufacturers are now foreign, officials said. And although there are U.S.-based bus manufacturers, they often locate plants in areas with lower operating costs and fewer government regulations.

Among the initiatives discussed at the Van Nuys meeting was a plan to talk with GM officials about using the Van Nuys plant to build electric cars, and Katz’s proposal for state legislation giving a bidding preference to transit manufacturers who would build products in the Los Angeles area, Montgomery said.

In addition, Assemblyman Tom Bane (D-Tarzana) talked of giving some type of sales tax break to vehicles produced in California. And officials agreed to form a task force to pursue keeping current manufacturing businesses in the region as well as attracting new ones, Montgomery said.

However, Kyser said political leaders have been better at talking about such programs than they have been at actually making the region more attractive to business. And as for the unemployed manufacturing workers in the near future, “the outlook for those people is pretty grim,” he said.