Full Funding for Red Line Backed : Transit: Senate subcommittee agrees with House on $110 million for subway. Move makes it unlikely that city’s allocation will be reduced in final appropriation.

Despite generally disappointing transit spending in next year’s federal budget, the Senate Appropriations Committee’s transportation subcommittee on Wednesday unexpectedly fulfilled Los Angeles’ wish and recommended $110 million for the Metro Red Line subway.

The full committee is expected to take up the funding today.

For the first time, the Senate’s Red Line funding target matches that in the House version of the 1993 transit spending bill. This means Los Angeles probably will not have to settle for a lesser amount when the two bills are reconciled in a conference committee later this year.

“This shows the Senate still supports funding for Segment 3 and getting an immediate start on rail extensions to East L.A., North Hollywood and Mid-City,” Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre said. “It means Congress recognizes the important part that the Red Line can play in Rebuild L.A.,” and that it is the core system for Metro Rail, he said.

Alatorre, as a Los Angeles County Transportation Commission board member, worked with Sen. John Seymour (R-Calif.) to lobby for the grants and for a formal commitment to pay about half of the rest of the cost of subway extensions into those areas.

That commitment, called a Full Funding Grant Agreement, is expected to be signed as the new federal fiscal year begins in October.

As requested by the LACTC, the construction grants would be divided between the second and third segments of the subway.

The second segment--consisting of two branches, one under Wilshire Boulevard from Alvarado Street to Western Avenue and the other north under Vermont Avenue and west beneath Hollywood Boulevard--will receive $50 million. These branches, already under construction, are scheduled to open later this decade. They have been budgeted at $1.446 billion.

The remaining $60 million is to be split evenly among the three extensions that comprise the third segment--from Hollywood to North Hollywood, west to the Mid-City district and east from Union Station into East Los Angeles. These extensions are scheduled to open by 2001. The North Hollywood leg is budgeted at $1.31 billion, or $222 million more than preliminary estimates. The Eastside leg is budgeted at $684.6 million; the Westside leg at $574.7 million.

The first segment of the Red Line, between Union Station and MacArthur Park, is scheduled to open in March.

“It definitely tells us we’re going to get at least $110 million,” said Bevan Dufty, the LACTC’s director of federal legislative affairs. “L.A. has always been seen as the favorite of the House, but not the Senate.”

Congressional openness to the Red Line grant requests--which help create thousands of construction jobs in an economically distressed but politically important state--have rekindled LACTC officials’ desire to recoup at least some of the $65 million in federal grants lost last year because of a technical error in an omnibus transportation policy bill.

At $110 million, Los Angeles remains the largest recipient of federal “new-start” funds, which are set aside out of the federal gas tax specifically to build mass transit systems that relieve traffic congestion.

The House has budgeted $897 million for new starts across the nation next year. The Senate is prepared to recommend only $690 million.

Other cities competing for these start-up funds include Honolulu, Dallas and Houston.