MTA’s Top-Secret Countinghouse

Perhaps nobody counts more in this town than the pocket-less employees who work at a nondescript building in Downtown Los Angeles.

They handle the money dropped into Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus fare boxes.

Inside the MTA’s countinghouse, whose precise location the agency keeps secret for security reasons, 29 workers handle more than one million coins of all types deposited every day into bus fare boxes and rail ticket machines: pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, tokens and on occasion, francs, pesos and Chuck E Cheese’s tokens.

This is no nickel-and-dime operation. The facility--which has no identifying signs but plenty of armed guards and cameras--processes about $125 million a year in dollars and cents.

To enter MTA’s cash-counting operation, you must pass through three locked doors. A sign on the wall reads: “A reward of up to $5,000 will be paid to any RTD employee who furnishes information resulting in the arrest and conviction of anyone who steals or assists in the theft of RTD property.”

When they report to work, security dictates that employees change into uniforms without pockets.

The workers feed the coins into machines, which do the actual counting. But dollar bills are stuffed into plastic bags and sold to private companies for about 97 cents on the dollar.

(MTA says it costs more for union workers to prepare for acceptance by the banks every one of the 200,000 or so dollar bills collected every day. Banks will only take dollar bills stacked face up in bundles of $100.)

The dollar bills are bundled by weight, not by volume. Every morning, one worker sets that day’s standard by counting out $4,000 in dollar bills, then weighing the money. Other workers then stuff the other dollars into bags that are weighed to match the standard. (For the record: $4,000 in dollar bills weighs about nine pounds, although it can fluctuate slightly. An MTA spokesman said they weigh the dollar bills every day “for atmospheric reasons. The dollar bills on a humid day can weigh more because there is more moisture in the air. On dry days, they can weigh less.”)

Workers sift through the stacks of paper money looking for $5, $10 and $20 bills. A $100 bill has been spotted.

Coins are dumped into machines, which separate them. The machines count 3,000 coins per minute, then spit them out into bags.

The facility gets more pennies than any other coin--about 350,000 a day.

Unlike other big cities, bus riders in Los Angeles can pay their fare with 110 pennies--or 135 pennies if a proposed fare increase goes into effect.

Not that the MTA welcomes the smallest of small change.

“The ‘dwell’ time at the fare box is very important to us,” Mike Butler, director of accounting, said, noting that dropping pennies in the fare box can delay boarding by other passengers.

Occasionally, the facility gets a call from an upset bus patron who has dropped a rare coin or other precious object into the fare box. Workers have returned keys and even wedding rings inadvertently dropped in the fare box.

The MTA facility is one of the busiest in a regional network of similar operations that keep the economy moving by processing the millions of coins deposited every day in Southern California’s pay phones, parking meters, news racks and vending machines.

Danny Horn, a clerk at the MTA cash-counting operation, said it takes muscles to excel in his line of work.

“No weakling can do it,” he said, bending over to lift a 50-pound bag of $1,000 in quarters.

It also requires a certain discretion. Horn doesn’t tell his friends what he does for a living.

“I don’t want them to know I work around a lot of money,” he said. “I’m afraid they might suggest something that I would never want to cross my mind.”