Taxi Ride Voucher Program Expands : Social services: Agencies assisting the needy throughout the county will distribute passes for free trips to doctors’ offices, food banks and shelters.

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission on Wednesday expanded a free taxi ride program formerly restricted to residents of riot-torn areas to include needy residents throughout the county.

The program, dubbed Operation Food Basket because it provided transportation in neighborhoods where markets had been burned, will now offer residents from Pacoima to El Monte free taxi rides to doctors’ offices, food banks, battered women’s shelters and other locations 24 hours a day. Social service agencies for the homeless, the poor and other groups will distribute the taxi vouchers.

“It’s like a dream come true,” said Betty Fisher, executive director of Haven Hills, a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Woodland Hills, one of the agencies that pass out vouchers. “Being able to take a taxi can literally mean the difference between life and death for a battered woman whose husband has taken her purse or checkbook.”

The commission voted 7 to 4 to spend $2 million more through June on the program, using funding provided by Proposition A, a half-cent sales tax increase approved by voters in 1980. The commission had previously allotted $380,000 in Proposition A funds in August.

The new allocation was proposed by Commissioner Richard Alatorre, a Los Angeles city councilman. It is more than double the amount recommended by the commission staff.

“I’d rather save the life of a kid or a battered woman than build a billion-dollar rail line,” said Nikolas Patsaouras, a transportation commissioner and candidate for Los Angeles mayor who voted to support the program.

The majority of the commission said Operation Food Basket, renamed the Immediate Need program, was necessary because a similar Los Angeles program serves only city residents who are elderly or disabled. Also, the city program requires clients to preregister and thus does not help those in urgent need of immediate transportation, said Jim McLaughlin, the county commission’s director of transit systems planning.

But Commissioner Jacki Bacharach, a Rancho Palos Verdes councilwoman, expressed concerns about what she said was inadequate monitoring of the program and voted against it. She suggested instead that the commission postpone the vote for a month until the staff had submitted a line-item budget for the program.

“How many people have used these vouchers, where were they going--no one has done an analysis,” Bacharach said in a telephone interview. “I really believe in it, but my concern is we’re walking into a financial liability we’re not sure is cost-effective. My fear is we may be creating expectations in the community we might not be able to live up to.”

Alatorre and others said there is an immediate need for the program, but made it clear they expected the staff to prepare additional financial reports as the program continues.

Since August, about 60,000 taxi coupons worth $7 apiece have been distributed to social service agencies, primarily in South-Central Los Angeles and Hollywood, by the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, which has been running the program, McLaughlin said. In turn, the agencies hand out up to four coupons per month per client.

With the geographical expansion, the commission added a co-administrator--the International Institute of Los Angeles, a social service agency for immigrants and refugees with contacts in East Los Angeles and the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

Starting this month, the social service agencies will be required to report the Social Security numbers of clients receiving taxi coupons to deter fraud, McLaughlin said.

“In general, if someone wanted to spend a lot of time and energy . . . they probably could” defraud the system by obtaining coupons from more than one agency, McLaughlin said. “But I don’t know if anyone would bother, and soon they won’t be able to.”