Transportation Key for Jobs, Pena Says

Saying the transportation industry has the greatest opportunity for creating new jobs, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Federico Pena on Thursday visited a public-private consortium in Burbank designed to help develop an electric vehicle industry in Southern California.

Pena, who is in Los Angeles to award more than $1 billion in federal grants to extend the city’s Metro Rail Red Line subway, called the CALSTART consortium a model for other public-private partnerships nationwide to emulate. He said such partnerships can help spark an economic recovery.

“President Clinton has said that unless California’s economy rebounds, the country’s economy can’t rebound,” Pena said in a meeting with CALSTART leaders.

He added that he will urge the federal government to spend more money in supporting partnerships like CALSTART that can use aerospace and defense technology to develop new industries.

“We are going to make this a high priority,” he said.

Lon E. Bell, who led the creation of CALSTART, said Pena’s visit was important to the consortium because Pena can help convince the federal government to spend more military defense dollars for the development of electric cars and other alternative vehicles such as clean-air buses and high-speed trains.

Pena’s tour is the latest of a series of visits by high-profile government officials to the facility. Since the consortium opened in June, it has been visited by former Sen. John Seymour, Sen. Diane Feinstein, Gov. Pete Wilson, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles), and Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar).

During his tour of the facility, Pena was shown several electric buses that are in use throughout Southern California and slides of a prototype electric car designed and built by CALSTART. The car is touring car shows throughout the world.

But he seemed most impressed by several electric vehicle components that CALSTART wants to sell to major car manufacturers who will be required to build zero-emission vehicles to meet clean air laws.

Pena was shown a voice-activated navigational system that responds to verbal commands to map out the fastest route to the driver’s destination.

“I heard about this,” he said. “I need one of these in Washington, D.C.”

The 155,000-square-foot facility that Pena toured was provided to the consortium by the Lockheed Corp. for $1 a year.

Bell, the driving force behind the partnership, is president of Amerigon Inc. a Monrovia-based electric car vehicle firm that won a $375,000 grant from the South Coast Air Quality Management District to build a prototype electric vehicle.

The consortium is made up of about 40 large companies and utilities The firms and utilities participating in the venture have contributed about $20 million to launch several transportation development projects.

Only about 100 jobs were created at the CALSTART facility. But CALSTART supporters say it will generate up to 55,000 new jobs as large automobile manufacturing companies begin to meet state mandates by making available 40,000 electric cars for sale each year in the state beginning in 1998, increasing to 200,000 by the year 2002.