Unassuming MTA Leader Takes the Expertise Route

Raul Perez is a public official who doesn’t attract much attention from the reporters.

A city councilman from the overwhelmingly Latino city of Huntington Park, Perez, 53, is an unassuming man who studiously looks over the numbers and plans as a member of the governing board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates this region’s massive transportation system.

As the MTA’s representative of cities in the southeast part of L.A. County, he’s not a star on the transit board. The real heavyweights on the board, by virtue of their office and political influence, are L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, L.A. City Councilman Richard Alatorre and Glendale Mayor Larry Zarian, who is the MTA board chairman. Riordan has four votes--his own and his three appointees--on the 13-member board that can sway a result one way or the other.

Reporters flock to the board’s stars when they want to make sense of the problems plaguing the MTA like, for example, its sinkhole-scarred subway construction project in Hollywood.

So when Perez made front-page news last week by saying he and a fellow MTA board member would call for the ouster of embattled MTA Chief Executive Officer Franklin E. White, the cynical scribes said Riordan and Alatorre were really behind the move. “Perez is just doing their bidding,” one of the cynics surmised.

I’m not so sure about that.

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Saying Raul Perez is doing someone else’s bidding ignores both the kind of elected official and person that he is.

I remember meeting him back in 1990 when Times reporter Rick Holguin and I were set to write about the dramatic changes that Huntington Park had undergone in the previous two decades. At the start of the 1970s, Huntington Park’s population of 30,000 was 80% white. By the time I met Perez at a city social mixer, the city population had grown to nearly 60,000--and more than 90% of the town was Latino.

Despite the dramatic change, no Latino had been elected to the five-member City Council or held any visible post in city government. Perez, since his arrival in town in 1963 from his native Guadalajara, had been working hard as a member of various civic groups to make the city more responsive to its Latino residents.

In 1990, he was making his sixth try for the City Council. He had lost five times before, but he wasn’t discouraged. Electing a Latino, I remembered him saying, would enable the city “to have empathy for [its Latino constituents].”

He won election that year and was the top vote-getter when he won reelection in 1994.

A mortgage broker, Perez soon worked on plans to help Huntington Park’s residents, many of whom must depend on public transportation to get to work or go to school. He pushed for more bus routes through Huntington Park. He worked for an integrated transit system that would connect area buses with the new Green Line, the light-rail project that links Norwalk with El Segundo and Los Angeles International Airport.

He also sits on a board overseeing the Alameda Corridor project, an ambitious plan to move cargo and other goods by connecting L.A.’s industrial core with the harbor by rail.

And, for good measure, Perez is the chair of the MTA’s construction committee.

While the reporters were looking the other way, Perez has become an authority on the subject of transportation. Public relations consultant Emma Schafer, looking for a way to jazz up her monthly luncheons on public policy and issues, recently trumpeted Perez at one meeting by calling him “Mr. Transportation of Southern California.” An overflow crowd showed up to hear Perez speak.

The nickname caught on, leaving Perez a little embarrassed. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he says. Schafer, however, says what many others have come to realize. “He really has dedicated a lot of time to this,” she says. “He’s very diligent. He has really applied himself on behalf of [Huntington Park] and the communities that he serves [on the MTA board].”

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Despite the fact that Franklin White has been receptive to many of Perez’s ideas about improving service, Perez thinks the MTA chief ought to step down, which is what got him on page one last week. Perez believes morale within the multibillion-dollar agency is bad and White doesn’t have the management skills to head the MTA.

He also thinks it’s unfair to say that race is behind the move to dump White, who is African American. “You can’t criticize anyone these days without someone saying, ‘You’re a racist,’ ” he says. “I have nothing against him because he’s black. He’s a nice guy personally, but he’s a poor manager.”

That’s a very unsexy explanation. It’s nothing an MTA heavyweight would say, but it is something that “Mr. Transportation” might.