Seeking Clarity in the Murky Reasons for Firing MTA Chief

Don’t expect Franklin E. White’s enemies to give all the reasons they are trying to fire him as chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Rather, their motives will be hidden in a fog of double talk if, as expected, the anti-White cabal engineers his removal at a meeting of the MTA board today.

That is clear from a reading of the evaluation forms filled out by a board personnel committee that recommended White’s firing last week.

I didn’t see the forms after they had been completed. All I saw was a blank one. But the questions on it show the vague reasons being given for White’s firing.

How, for example, can you judge anyone by this mushy standard? “Develop a vision and direction for the organization which has board support.” Or how could you tell if anyone has achieved “a management structure with a business orientation that places responsibility, accountability, decision-making and authority at the appropriate levels of management.”

What’s more important in the affair are the tough decisions White made that antagonized his main adversaries, Mayor Richard Riordan, Councilman Richard Alatorre and several big contractors.

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The record of those decisions was documented in a series of stories by The Times’ David Willman.

White alienated the contractors after Willman disclosed that concrete in tunnel walls of the Red Line subway were as thin as 4.87 inches in some places, about seven inches less than required by the MTA’s standards. Despite the objections of powerful contracting firms , White set up a panel of outside experts to study the situation. In the end, White forced Tutor-Saliba, a firm with major political connections, to pump 2,000 tons of concrete-based material into the downtown tunnels to correct the problem.

The CEO went against the contractors again when he fired Ed McSpedon, the head of the MTA’s construction unit, the Rail Construction Corp. The contractors felt that McSpedon was sympathetic to them. But White, unhappy over the trouble-plagued Hollywood Boulevard leg of the Red Line, demanded stricter controls over the companies building and supervising construction of the subway’s twin tunnels.

In fact, White insisted on the hiring of a tough inspector general, Arthur Sinai, to root out corruption in the MTA. Sinai helped spark federal investigations into use of cheap and shoddy materials in the subway project.

White’s opposition to transit projects backed by Mayor Riordan and City Councilman Alatorre got White in trouble from the beginning.

Alatorre was the single most powerful board member when Riordan was elected mayor.

He had been placed on the board by Riordan’s predecessor, Tom Bradley. In the race to replace Bradley, Alatorre, a powerful Latino leader, supported Riordan. The mayor, who appoints three members of the 13-member body and holds a seat himself, kept Alatorre on the panel.

Alatorre, once Bradley’s most effective defender in City Hall, assumed the same role for Riordan. Their collaboration extended to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, particularly when it came to making decisions on transit routes.

White took over the MTA during this period. He quickly discovered that the authority was in financial trouble and proposed canceling the rail line to Pasadena. It was to go through Alatorre’s district.

Moreover, Riordan was familiar with the project. As a private attorney in his pre-mayoral days, he was employed by the transit agency to negotiate the purchase of the right of way from downtown to Pasadena from the Santa Fe railroad.

A company partially owned by Riordan had a contract with the MTA to do environmental studies for the Pasadena line construction. Riordan, who placed his holdings in a blind trust after becoming mayor, said he didn’t know about the contract. But his critics accused him of a conflict of interest.

In the end, Riordan and Alatorre saved the Pasadena line from White’s budget-cutting ax. The fight had been so divisive, so bitter, that White never recovered.

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These issues of competence and honesty will remain long after White leaves.

Tough federal inspectors, suspicious that Washington’s funds are being wasted, won’t be interested in the mushy bureaucratic generalities used by White’s opponents. Neither will the congressional committees in charge of financing MTA projects.

They know of the record of shoddy construction and political influence and will want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.