In Departing, Fired MTA Chief Unloads His Frustrations : Transit: Contract ‘fixes,’ election-year boondoggles and special interest ‘inbreeding’ were roadblocks, he says.

It was the kind of public cleansing--a virtual indictment of an entire agency by its top executive--that could be delivered only by a man who knew he would soon be out of a job.

Contract “fixes,” election-year boondoggles, special interest “money trains”--such things had been rumored long before Wednesday. Government whistle-blowers would whisper the allegations, law enforcement agents would investigate them, and community gadflies would shout about them from the top of their soapboxes.

But never before at the county’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority had someone of such power and firsthand knowledge offered such a sobering assessment of the workings of an agency that he said was dominated by politics and special interest “inbreeding.”

This was Franklin E. White’s goodbye salvo, delivered hours before his bosses on the MTA board would vote to fire him because they maintained he had been an ineffective leader. Ironically, it came from a man who has been one of the agency’s biggest cheerleaders, working diligently to improve its image.

“It was a bombshell,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member who supported White. “I thought his statement was truly stunning.”

Some rivals to White dismissed his statement as the musings of a bitter man. Mayor Richard Riordan--who led the effort to fire the chief executive--appeared frustrated when asked about White’s characterizations, saying he had pressed White without success to act on such rumors and allegations. “Where is it? What’s being done?” the mayor asked.

But an aide to one board member said: “He articulated in public what everyone had understood for a long, long time in private. He lifted the curtain on a large number of MTA operations that the public was never aware of.”

White, who just moved into his new office on the 25th floor of the MTA’s new Union Station building, never got a chance to unpack the boxes that still filled his office Wednesday. But in a half-hour address to a jammed boardroom, he did unload 2 1/2 years of frustrations over an agency that he portrayed in desperate straits.

The CEO acknowledged that he was worried about his reputation after searing reviews from Riordan and other detractors. And, speaking more to the public audience than to the MTA board members, said he wanted to set the record straight.

Even as he left the agency, White said, he could not vouch that the agency’s billion-dollar business has been carried out “completely straight.”

Time and again, White said, he would hear speculation in the community that “things aren’t straight over at the MTA. Everybody I met would say that.”

What soon became clear, White said, was that there seemed to be some truth to it. Industry contractors who wanted a piece of the MTA’s $5.8-billion subway project would get an inside track with their favorite politician, and the process became tainted, he said.

White recounted that before the MTA’s construction subsidiary was abolished in controversy last year, he would often hear word on the street about how the agency would rule on a contract award--long before it happened. “It was sickening,” White said.

He characterized the coziness between the MTA and the industry as “inbreeding.”

“This is a money train, and if you get between the people who want the money and the people who spend the money, you’ve got problems,” White told the board. “That explains why we’re here.”

White said he forced the board to realize in 1993 that it would have to divert $300 million to finish the now-completed Green Line to El Segundo or else face virtual bankruptcy. And he noted that despite resistance, he urged the board to delay or scrap a host of other projects, including a trolley line from downtown to Pasadena.

He said these and other proposals represented “idiocy” on the part of board members who “didn’t have the foggiest idea” how to develop a long-range transportation plan for the region. Without naming names, he said board members would nonetheless push their pet projects because it “will be good for them in their next election.”

By opposing such proposals, he said, “I made enemies.”

Indeed, several leaders in the contracting industry said they would welcome White’s departure.

“The MTA has been very hostile, and he’s certainly not a favorite of the contractors,” said one contracting executive who asked not to be identified. “I’m sure the industry is hoping that you can work better with the MTA after he is gone.”

In an interview, the 54-year-old White said he had tough days before--such as the escape of half a dozen prisoners from Death Row when he was secretary of transportation for the state of Virginia. But Wednesday was the “most difficult” because it was so personal.

He said he was disappointed “in the unprofessional way” his firing was handled, but relieved to be gone from “by far the hardest job I’ve ever had. My family will be pleased that 90-hour weeks will be no more.”

“What I brought to the MTA was what I thought it needed above all. It needs somebody who will be strong enough to provide unwelcome advice,” he said. “That’s what I did well, and frankly, did it courageously. And it cost me.”

During his stormy tenure, he encountered a seemingly never-ending string of embarrassments in connection with construction of the Los Angeles subway--from a temporary cutoff of federal funds for the project to a giant sinkhole that engulfed half a block of Hollywood Boulevard to hundreds of claims and, just the other day, a critical report on “60 Minutes.”

White had to deal with a nine-day bus strike and a budget deficit. Ironically, the former civil rights attorney also found himself named a defendant in a lawsuit accusing the MTA of discriminating against minority and poor bus riders.

White’s toughest job was dealing with 13 board members, all with their own egos and political agendas.

He got into a shouting match with the mayor earlier this year over the MTA’s lobbying efforts in Sacramento.

And he incurred the enmity of MTA board member and City Councilman Richard Alatorre to the point where the two hardly spoke to each other.

White, who leaves his post Jan. 1, told the board: “This job, I say to my friends, makes my [former] job in New York look like kindergarten.”