A Driven Man Keeps Heat on the MTA

When Eric Mann stood up at a recent meeting to address the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, its chairman told him to make his point in two minutes.

“Three minutes!” Mann demanded.

The director of the closest thing Los Angeles has to a bus riders lobby got his three minutes. And these days, after years of being dismissed as an Ivy League-educated gadfly, he’s getting the MTA’s attention and, at times, even the grudging respect of transit officials.

The turning point was a lawsuit brought by Mann and his scrappy group, the Labor/Community Strategy Center, against the MTA.

The suit, which is scheduled for trial in the spring, accuses the agency of discriminating against minority and poor bus riders by pouring money into rail projects that will largely benefit white suburban commuters. The case, which is being closely watched by transit agencies across the county, seeks to shift hundreds of millions of dollars from rail construction to reduce bus fares and improve service.

Mann, who only a few years ago was escorted out of an MTA meeting by transit police clad in riot gear, gained more respect last year after his group’s lawsuit blocked a bus fare increase for five months and saved the popular monthly transit pass from elimination.

The trial will cover the broader issue of whether the transit agency operates a “separate and unequal system of public transportation.” MTA officials deny the allegations of discrimination and defend their plans to build a network of rail lines as necessary to solve the region’s traffic problems.

The outcome of the trial could dramatically alter the county’s rail construction plans, including slowing down construction of the subway.

Transit officials--who already have spent nearly $1 million in legal bills preparing for the case--have said that a reduced fare will require more buses.

But Mann asks, “What kind of transit agency tells us that’s a problem?”

The lawsuit is the latest fight for the 53-year-old Mann, a self-described social revolutionary who--with a political science degree from Cornell--once went to work as an auto worker to better understand the plight of the working class.

How did a kid from a middle-class Long Island family end up devoting a life to social change?

“I was exposed to the idea that social change was also an intellectual pursuit,” said the son of a onetime socialist organizer.

Mann said he was the victim of anti-Semitism as a child. “I was pretty badly beaten up. It made my sense of empathy with the civil rights movement very profound.”

A turning point occurred when black students visited Cornell to build support for a boycott of Woolworth’s. “They started saying things like, ‘You worry about whether you’re going to get an A or B. I worry about whether I can get a meal . . . or having to risk my life to sit at a lunch counter.’ ”

After graduation, he went to work for the Congress of Racial Equality in Harlem and campaigned successfully to integrate the Trailways bus company.

He worked for Students for a Democratic Society and organized college students to oppose the Vietnam War. He eventually made his way to California and took a job on an auto assembly line applying instrument panels to Camaros.

He and others fighting to keep open the General Motors plant in Van Nuys formed the Labor/Community Strategy Center in 1989. Though the plant eventually closed, the group took on new causes.

Today, the organization, which received about $500,000 in foundation grants and member dues in 1993, is involved in a number of issues, ranging from transit problems to immigrant rights to a boycott of Texaco to protest emissions from its Wilmington refinery.

Mann makes no secret of his unconventional views.

“I am definitely a socialist,” he said.

But the strategy center is not. “It’s an anti-corporate organization, not anti-capitalist,” said the former labor organizer. “What we have to do is unite people who all agree that corporate profit cannot be the centerpiece of society.”

Considering that one of the major players at the MTA is that consummate capitalist, Mayor Richard Riordan, Mann’s task would not appear easy. Yet Riordan has indicated that he shares the group’s goal of improving bus service, though the mayor and Mann have yet to agree on how to accomplish that task.

As the group’s director, Mann supervises a staff of five and dozens of volunteers who ride buses to organize passengers. Mann refused to specify his salary, saying it is between $40,000 and $50,000 a year.

He is ever-present at MTA meetings, giving the 13 board members a down-in-the-street view of public transit.

Buses are crowded, dirty and dangerous, he complains.

By contrast, trains are uncrowded, comfortable, clean and safe.

One statistic he often cites: rail riders who account for 6% of the MTA’s ridership are consuming 70% of the MTA capital and operating budget.

Mann and his group advocate:

* An immediate rollback in fares from $1.35 to a $1 flat fare with no transfer charge, with an eventual cut to 50 cents. They also want the $49 monthly pass reduced immediately to $40 and eventually to $20.

* Doubling the bus fleet, including the purchase of electric or other non-polluting buses.

* An elected MTA board.

* Bus-only lanes on city streets.

“This is not just an effort to fix the bus system,” Mann said. “It’s an effort to look at what we call a civil-rights-meets-the-environment vision for mass transit in L.A.”

Transit officials dismiss Mann’s ideas as financially and politically impractical, and consider him doctrinaire.

Even though he has grown to respect Mann, MTA Chairman Larry Zarian said that the activist is too narrowly focused on the bus system. “He’s got tunnel vision,” he said. “We need to build a system for the future, too.”

Zarian said that Los Angeles bus fares are in line with those charged in other cities, and that any reduction would require a higher taxpayer subsidy.

Lowering the fare, said an MTA staff report, is “an extraordinarily expensive way to stimulate ridership. Not only do you need to add capacity to accommodate the added riders, whose fares do not pay for the cost of the added service, but less revenue is recovered from the previous riders.”

Critics also say that Mann is unwilling to consider cost-saving measures.

During a recent state Senate hearing, Transportation Committee Chairman Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco) asked Mann if he was prepared to support contracting out bus driver jobs to lower-paid nonunion workers.

“Are you going to entertain privatization?” asked Kopp.

When Mann said no, Kopp remarked, “I’m listening to you less seriously than before.”

Mann later explained: “The system stays in power by asking every oppressed group to sell out somebody else.”

Joe Hicks, executive director of the Multicultural Collaborative, a multiracial, privately funded human relations agency, praises Mann as “one of the few unashamed leftists around.”

James E. Moore II, associate professor of urban and regional planning at USC, said of Mann: “Empowerment is an overused word, but a lot of what he does is to empower people who might otherwise feel shut out of public policy discourse.”

Mann’s views, however, are not always predictable.

He opposed state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), an old ally who supported the diversion of $50 million from the MTA to ease Los Angeles County’s fiscal crisis. Mann asserted that the transit funds were needed to improve bus service. In its lawsuit, the bus riders group argues that the shift shows the MTA had the money to avert last year’s bus fare increase.

Mann also recently came out against the dismissal of MTA chief Franklin E. White, who, ironically, was a defendant in the lawsuit. Mann said White was the “scapegoat” for the board’s failed policies.

In the court case, Mann’s group has powerful legal allies in the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the ACLU.

Robin Kelley, a New York University professor of history and African studies, sees the legal battle as an important civil rights case that attacks “a kind of class-based racism that maintains the invisible barriers.”

Transit agencies, “not just in L.A. but elsewhere, are getting out of the business of transporting the poor,” he said. “They’re moving into the business, more so than ever, of making suburbia accessible to urban cores.”

The MTA contends in court papers that the the rail lines, once completed, will be heavily used by minorities.

Mann, however, said the lawsuit is part of an old struggle with a new twist.

“Buses have been symbols of the civil rights movement since the days of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott,” Mann recently told author Mike Davis in the Nation.

“But the issues have fundamentally changed. Then it was the right to sit at the front of the bus; now it is the right to have a seat or a bus, period.”