Riordan Sets His Sights on Tighter Control of MTA : Transit: His goal is to tame bureaucracy and boost accountability. But political pitfalls abound.

Frustrated by managerial problems that he says “drive me nuts” and concerned that his own economic recovery plan will falter without better public transportation, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan is moving to assert greater control over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the troubled agency that oversees the nation’s largest public works project.

The mayor--who not only sits on the MTA’s board but also appoints three of its 13 members--signaled his aggressive new approach recently when he pushed through decisions on two of the agency’s longstanding problems. In the course of a single board meeting, Riordan successfully argued for a committee of MTA board members to assume oversight of all the agency’s rail construction contracts, and forced a final decision on a controversial east-west route across the San Fernando Valley.

“When the mayor delivered his four votes on the east-west line,” says County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, himself a board member, “it was the first time he’d gotten his people to vote as a bloc. That was a Rubicon he crossed. It sends a message that he is now a force to be reckoned with here.”

And, like Caesar on the Rubicon’s shore, Riordan is a man with a plan and without fear of combat. As outlined during an interview, his MTA campaign envisions action on three fronts:

* Reform of the complex bureaucracy created when the MTA was formed by the statutory merger of the Southern California Rapid Transit District and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. That process, according to Riordan, will include a hard look at how the MTA’s chief executive, Franklin E. White, has performed. Others say the mayor feels that White may have to go.

* Closer oversight of the MTA’s ongoing construction project, which eventually will encompass 450 miles of subway and fixed rail lines at a projected cost of $183 billion. When the MTA’s tunneling operation caused widespread subsidence along Hollywood Boulevard recently, federal transportation authorities temporarily cut off payments to the agency until it demonstrated an ability to better manage its affairs. Riordan’s new oversight committee is designed to address those concerns.

* Finally, the mayor hopes to engineer some sort of equilibrium between the interests of politically influential lobbyists and contractors, who believe that progress on the rail project ought to be MTA’s top priority, and the needs of the hundreds of thousands of working-class bus riders, who need reliable public transit to get to and from their jobs.

Already Southern California’s most visible elected official, Riordan stands to gain additional stature if he can solve any of these problems. Each, however, has formidable political pitfalls.

Riordan says his immediate priority is bringing the MTA bureaucracy to heel. He is clear about how he thinks the county agency is run.

“I am not happy with the management,” he says. “Too much of the thinking over there lets politics and process drive them to adopt certain goals. I’m a person who believes in setting goals and then figuring out the best way to reach them. Then, I do it.

“To be blunt,” he said of the MTA’s executives, “they drive me nuts.”

As an example, Riordan cited the response he received when he asked for an immediate study of inner-city bus service, which the mayor said needs vast improvement.

“Months passed and I asked where the report was. As it turns out, they’d done absolutely nothing,” Riordan recalled. “That makes me mad. When I asked why they hadn’t done anything, they said they didn’t think I was serious. . . . What I wanted and what this problem requires is some real thinking on the question, and their bureaucracy just cannot provide it.”

Increasingly, Riordan’s frustrations with the MTA have come to focus on White, a soft-spoken lawyer who formerly was transit commissioner of New York state. There, he was well regarded not only for his management style, but also for his good relations with Gov. Mario Cuomo and David Dinkins, then mayor of New York City. White’s selection for the MTA job in February, 1993, was widely seen as a victory for then-Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, in part because both men are African Americans.

However, both Riordan and his chief of staff, William Ouchi, frequently have expressed unhappiness with White’s performance. In fact, two members of the agency’s board who asked not to be identified say the mayor has discussed with them the possibility of removing White.

Here’s how one MTA board member describes his conversations with Riordan: “He hasn’t discussed with me any effort to get rid of Franklin. What he has done is tell me he thinks Franklin ‘is in over his head.’ And I’m not the only person he’s said that to. Around here, when the mayor tells you that about someone, you assume he wants to get rid of him. With Riordan, it’s hard to know when he is just venting or when he’s plotting. That causes problems.”

When asked directly what his intentions toward White are, Riordan’s reply is indirect, but not ambiguous: “I don’t think Frank White is against change,” he says. “But for whatever reason he’s not able to act. So, what I’ve been doing is discussing the situation with various members of the MTA board. You always should evaluate how your CEO is doing. And when you’ve had the kinds of problems MTA has had over the past year, then I think you have to take a very hard look at the people in charge.

“We’re about to do that in a formal sense. I’ve just been named to chair a CEO Evaluation Committee for the board. . . . I stand ready to help Franklin restructure that agency. It has problems no one possibly could solve by themselves. But no amount of help is going to make a difference, if he doesn’t act.”

White declines to “comment specifically” on his relationship with the mayor, except to say they “work closely together.”

Deputy Mayor Rae Franklin James, Riordan’s transit expert, says that part of the difficulty between White and the mayor is a matter of style. “Franklin is methodical; he wants a detailed plan before he starts,” she says. “The mayor is a businessman; he likes to get things moving and then correct as he goes.”

According to another firsthand observer of the Riordan-White relationship, part of the strain between them derives directly from the attitudes the mayor acquired during his business career: “What I see is the arrogance of a guy from the private sector who holds people who choose a career in public service in contempt. He thinks, ‘If you’ve really got anything on the ball, why aren’t you out there making millions like I did?’ ”

Whatever the sources of his discontent, Riordan will face opposition if he moves too precipitously against White. Some of it will come from within the MTA board itself. Yaroslavsky, for example, is prepared to oppose any move against the CEO. “Some of the frustration you hear expressed about Franklin comes from the fact that he simply won’t allow himself to be bullied,” Yaroslavsky says.

Riordan also will face additional difficulties in the city’s African American community, which was the only ethnic group he did not carry in his mayoral election. Many of its leading members already are alarmed by the mayor’s uneasy relationship with Police Chief Willie L. Williams, the city’s highest-ranking black official.

City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas warns that there will be strong community opposition to any attempt to remove White.

“What is it the mayor thinks Mr. White can’t do?” Ridley-Thomas said. “Riordan’s effort has not gone unnoticed. He had better not ride that train.”

As unwieldy and unresponsive as the mayor says he finds White and the MTA bureaucrats, he may discover that the agency’s contracting process is an even tougher nut to crack. The cozy relationship between the agency’s staff and its contractors was one of the problems federal authorities cited when they recently cut off funds to the project.

“You’re always going to have problems with the biggest public works program in America,” says Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who carried the legislation that created the MTA. “But here you also have a board that micro-manages, as opposed to dealing with broad policy questions and letting the professionals run things. These guys want to decide what color the doorknobs are--and, as it turns out, they have a lot of friends who make doorknobs.”

This is an issue on which Riordan will find it hard to seize the high ground, if only because his lengthy career as a successful attorney, investor and venture capitalist put him on a first-name basis with many of the contractors competing for MTA business.

Earlier this year, he played a key role in winning approval of $97 million to begin building a rail line between Downtown and Pasadena. As The Times subsequently reported, one of the beneficiaries of that decision was an engineering firm, Tetra Tech Inc., in which Riordan holds $9.75 million in stock. Those shares, like all the mayor’s investments, currently are held in a blind trust.

Riordan said he was unaware that Tetra Tech was involved in any way with the contract. Whether the mayor’s handling of the matter violated conflict-of-interest statutes is being reviewed by the state Fair Political Practices Commission.

However skeptical MTA observers may be of Riordan’s willingness to be hard-nosed with runaway contract costs, he has already demonstrated that he is prepared to do so by narrowing the number of board members who can be held directly accountable for construction projects. Accountability, according to critics inside and outside the MTA, is the agency’s central problem.

“Circumstances have produced an agency that is unaccountable, unresponsive, sometimes irresponsible and often more concerned with the economic welfare of its contractors than with the welfare of the general public,” insists Yaroslavsky.

In fact, in a period of governmental downsizing, the rail system project, with its guaranteed 1% share of the county sales tax and ready access to federal funds, is the only game in town for the legion of contractors and consultants who depend on public projects for their livelihoods. They are the construction project’s biggest constituency and the reason a larger number of lobbyists--more than 1,000--now are registered to do business with the MTA board than are signed up to lobby the California Legislature.

To get a sense of the sort of stakes they are playing for, it helps to attend the board’s meetings, which are held in the vast Downtown chamber where the County Board of Supervisors regularly gathers. On the right-hand wall, high above the stage on which the members sit, there is an inscribed admonition: “This County Is Founded on Free Enterprise. Cherish and Help Preserve It.” The theater-style seats that fill the rest of the room usually are packed with well-dressed men and women--lobbyists, lawyers, contractors and consultants--eager to help the MTA do just that.

Since Jan. 1, the board has awarded $553,292,246 in contracts to private firms. During the period it also has approved an additional $175,855,569 in contract amendments, extensions, options and change orders, for an 11-month total of $729,147,815.

Spending these sums effectively--while reining in the bureaucracy--is crucial to Riordan’s hopes of turning the agency into a vehicle of economic recovery, one of the issues on which he won election.

“In the short term,” he says, MTA’s construction projects have “the potential to focus attention and effort where it should be--on Southern California’s ability to grow economically and to conduct the commerce that will restore us to prosperity.

“In the longer-term,” he says, “efficient, accessible public transit--buses and fixed rail--will have its most dramatic and, to my mind, most important impact on the inner city and its economic welfare. As our economy continues to recover, as the jobs become available, we need a system that helps people get to and from them. It’s that simple.”

And for Riordan, that means that the system will have to perform efficiently for both middle-class rail commuters and blue-collar bus riders.

Raphael J. Sonenshein, a professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton who currently is studying the MTA, agrees.

“For me, class is the most important thing,” he says, “which means that when you think about where this system should go and who it should serve, you ought to be weighing bus versus rail.”

Says Riordan: “That’s exactly why we’re taking such a hard look at the MTA’s management. It’s going to take incredible leadership ever to strike that balance.”

But at least one highly placed MTA official is skeptical that the mayor or anyone else will be able to strike a real balance between the interests of wealthy, well-connected subway builders able to make political contributions in cash, and the needs of working-class bus riders, many of whom cannot even express their needs in English.

“Money really is the mother’s milk of politics,” he says, “and these guys on the MTA board have gotten hold of a dairy. There are members who like that power and they’d shoot to keep their seats.”