Panel Urges Firing of Transit Chief : MTA: Campaign led by Mayor Riordan culminates in vote during closed meeting. White refuses to acknowledge defeat after the vote.

After an intense, behind-the-scenes campaign led by Mayor Richard Riordan, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority committee Friday recommended the firing of transit chief Franklin E. White, virtually assuring that he will become the top casualty in the battered agency’s bid to rebound from a string of embarrassing setbacks.

Although a binding vote by the full MTA board on White’s fate is not expected until Wednesday, even some of the chief executive’s supporters were speaking of his 2 1/2-year tenure in the past tense after Friday’s meeting, predicting that he cannot survive.

“They’ve got the votes. I think he’s gone,” James Cragin, a strong supporter of White, conceded as he emerged dejectedly from a three-hour, closed-door meeting.

White refused to acknowledge defeat Friday after the meeting.

The soft-spoken, 54-year-old lawyer appeared calm and even upbeat, saying he would not handicap next week’s vote. He told reporters that he has not considered resigning and that his chief regret in the months-long debate over his future is that board members had circumvented their prescribed process for evaluating his work in the $178,000-a-year post.

The recommendation to fire White came on a 3-2 vote after an acrimonious meeting that some experts said may have violated state open-meeting laws.

Several 1st Amendment lawyers maintained that what was supposed to be a meeting of an MTA committee turned into a de facto meeting of the full board when at least nine board members--more than a majority of the 13-member body--showed up and took part in the closed-door discussion.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), an ardent critic of the MTA’s $5.8-billion subway project, urged the city attorney’s office to pursue misdemeanor prosecution against board members over the alleged violation and to invalidate the results of the meeting.

Riordan refused to discuss the specifics of the meeting, but in an interview afterward offered his harshest assessment to date of White’s performance, saying that he has been too slow to act on the agency’s myriad problems.

“You’ve had under Franklin paralysis by analysis,” Riordan said. “He is a micro-manager. Every decision goes into his office and is not made. People down below are afraid to make decisions. I think Franklin is a very nice, honorable person, and I have no animosity toward him. I just think he’s the wrong person for the job.”

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The vote came just two days before “60 Minutes” is scheduled to run a critical piece that will air the MTA’s troubles before a national television audience, worrying agency officials who rely on members of Congress for hundreds of millions in subway funds.

Agency officials speculate that such publicity, coupled with the MTA board’s reputation for second-guessing its chief executive, could make it difficult to find top candidates for the job if White is forced out. Riordan refused to discuss possible successors but said he wants someone with the “courage to make tough decisions” on the region’s transit plans.

“Are we going to tunnel down Wilshire or Pico west of Western?” Riordan asked. “Are we going to tunnel in the Valley? With the projected lack of money in Washington and Sacramento, are there better ways to service the Valley?”

A change in leadership at the MTA could signal a broader debate over the direction of the agency in several critical areas that have proved controversial for White--including the extension of the subway to the Eastside and the construction of a $1-billion light-rail line from Pasadena to Downtown. Names mentioned as possible successors include deputy CEO Joseph Drew, state Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), Long Beach City Manager James Hankla and former state legislator Michael Roos.

Joining Riordan in opposing White were committee Chairman Supervisor Deane Dana and member Raul Perez, a Huntington Park city councilman. Returning briefly to public session to adjourn the meeting, Dana refused to even acknowledge the closed-door vote and defended the participation of the board majority in the session. “This is the way we operate,” he said.

Opposing the recommendation to fire White were MTA Board Chairman Larry Zarian, who is White’s strongest supporter, and county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke.

“This was the kind of day that you want to put behind you,” Zarian said after the meeting. “I can’t predict [what will happen at next week’s vote]. I’m too numb.”

The MTA has been hit with an escalating series of financial, legal and political setbacks in the last several years, ranging from massive cost overruns on its subway construction to corruption investigations and the June sinkhole that swallowed part of Hollywood Boulevard.

Riordan and his allies have been pressing for months to hold White responsible for many of these problems, maintaining that he has failed to show the needed leadership in presiding over one of the biggest public works projects in U.S. history.

The mayor, under criticism from some quarters for allegedly targeting black city leaders such as White and Police Chief Willie L. Williams, has kept a low public profile in the debate over White and has maintained that he wanted to reserve final judgment on him.

Riordan left Friday’s meeting hurriedly without speaking to reporters, but participants made it clear that he had kept up his aggressive attack on White during the three-hour session. At one point, a source said, the mayor stood up and angrily waved a copy of a local black magazine with an MTA advertisement featuring a picture of White and questioned whether his contract allowed for such a high-profile role.

“This was all Riordan today. Without Riordan, this would not have happened. He is the key,” said one official.

Indeed, the mayor holds three appointments to the 13-member board, in addition to his own seat, and he is thus seen as the crucial voice on White’s future. Riordan said he would try to persuade his appointees to support his view, but would not direct them how to vote.

Councilman Richard Alatorre, who also serves on the MTA board and has been an equally aggressive critic of White, said after the meeting that White has “foot-dragged” on projects such as the extension of the subway to Alatorre’s Eastside district.

“We just need somebody that can be a manager, that can make decisions, that can restore confidence,” Alatorre said. “He’s paid a lot of money to make decisions, and he can’t make them. He hasn’t done very well in trying to project a positive image of the agency.”

But White’s supporters maintain that he is being made a scapegoat.

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Echoing a theme that they have voiced with increased stridence in recent weeks, several supporters said Friday that White is being forced out primarily because he stressed that the agency could not afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a variety of pet projects favored by individual board members. As a result, he helped kill an elaborate electrictrolley program and scaled back a variety of long-range rail plans. Supporters say he paid the price.

“I think he was honest--that was his problem. He didn’t know how to play politics,” Cragin said.

MTA board member Zev Yaroslavsky, a Los Angeles County supervisor, said that fellow board members “made [it] impossible” for White to do his job by micro-managing the agency and forcing him to consider a plethora of unrealistic projects.

White, in his failed bid to hold the committee’s support, said during the closed-session meeting that his aim at the agency has been to break the pattern of “fiscal fantasy,” worrying more about the MTA’s financial health than about his own popularity. “If you have a CEO who is afraid to give you straight talk, then you don’t have an effective manager,” White said, according to a statement he released to reporters.

But the committee was unswayed, and the vote went as had been predicted for weeks. If fired next week, White would receive a severance package amounting to more than $200,000.

White served as New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s state transportation commissioner and was hired in February 1993 on then-Mayor Tom Bradley’s recommendation to run the agency created by the merger of the county’s transit agencies, the Southern California Rapid Transit District and Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

White moved just this week into his 25th-floor office in the elaborate new MTA high-rise building next to Union Station. He professed little anxiety about the prospect of having to vacate the new quarters so quickly, saying only: “The process will work its way.”