Soul-Searching Time for MTA

Perhaps it is no surprise that Joseph E. Drew, beleaguered chief of the troubled Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is leaving his post. Drew, who announced his resignation Wednesday, said that MTA board politics and “public hypercriticism” of him and his agency had made his job impossible.

That may be so, but Drew, in his post for less than a year, stirred up a good deal of the controversy that has now engulfed him. In October he selected a consortium to manage construction of the Red Line subway extension into Los Angeles’ Eastside; that group, it turned out, was politically well-connected but had been rated dead last by an outside panel of experts in an evaluation of competitors for the work. The handling of the $65-million contract directed toward Drew a firestorm that included charges of cronyism and poor management. Last week he withdrew the recommendation.

Drew’s resignation follows the firing of his predecessor, Franklin E. White, late last year and the departure in 1993 of White’s predecessor, Neil Peterson, who headed the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. (In 1993 the LACTC and the Southern California Rapid Transit District, operator of the buses, were folded into the newly created MTA.)

Any agency that chews up three chiefs in so short a time has problems that go deeper than the person at the top. The MTA has generated a raft of financial, legal and political disputes in recent years involving, among other things, serious damage and dislocations caused by subway construction and an estimated $1-billion budget shortfall in Los Angeles County’s long-range transportation plan. The task now for the agency’s board and local political leaders is not just to find a new chief but to rethink the agency’s operations.