MTA Board Delays Vote on Subway Across the Valley

Effectively shielding Mayor Richard Riordan from a sensitive political issue until after the April 8 election, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted Wednesday to delay a decision on whether to jettison plans for a subway across the San Fernando Valley.

By opting to wait for an environmental review before making a final decision, the MTA board ensured that the contentious issue, which has roiled the Valley for decades, will not come before the board again until its end-of-April meeting at the earliest.

That postponement will allow Riordan, who has said recently that the city cannot afford the east-west Valley subway, to campaign for a second term over the next few months without the risk of taking action that would alienate Valley voters, who are crucial to his reelection bid.

“It’s a fig leaf” for the mayor, said one official, who asked not to be named.

Riordan, whose position on the Valley subway has proven fluid over the past few years, ignited a furor last week when he voted in an MTA committee not to seek federal funding to design the subway, which was to run from North Hollywood to Woodland Hills.

On Wednesday, he reiterated his opposition to building a subway along Burbank and Chandler boulevards, although he was primarily responsible for lining up the MTA board behind that route in 1994.

“I do not believe a subway will ever go down Burbank-Chandler, nor do I believe it should,” Riordan said during a brief but at times acrimonious discussion at the MTA meeting.

But he and county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a political ally who also serves on the MTA board, recommended deferring action until a long-awaited environmental impact report on the route is released, probably at the end of March, detailing all the options for a rail line, whether underground, at ground level or above the surface.

“At that point we’re going to have some difficult decisions to make,” Yaroslavsky said. He urged the board not “to prejudge the EIR” by going ahead with a decision Wednesday.

Waiting for the environmental review would also protect the transit agency from accusations that it flouted proper procedure and acted prematurely, and possibly from legal action, said Yaroslavsky, who last week labeled the move to summarily drop the subway “a boneheaded play.”

The board accepted the recommendation to postpone debate, with dissent coming only from Supervisor Mike Antonovich, a longtime champion of an elevated railway along the Ventura Freeway. The board also approved a request to the federal government for $58 million to study possible subway designs for the trans-Valley route--in effect reversing the controversial decision of last week.

“That’s the best that we can do at this point,” said Larry Gray, transportation chairman for the influential Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. “It’s probably good.”

His qualified support represents the political benefit Riordan will likely reap from Wednesday’s delay, observers said. Leaders of Valley homeowner and business groups were surprised, and many dismayed, by last week’s MTA committee vote to scrap the subway, particularly leaders who have pined for a cross-Valley mass transit system--especially in the form of a subway--for years.

But Bill Carrick, Riordan’s campaign consultant, said Wednesday’s move was not part of any strategy to minimize political damage from last week’s announcement or to defuse Valley anger before the election.

“I’m the principal strategist in the campaign, and I didn’t know a thing about it until you told me,” Carrick told a reporter. “That wasn’t anything I’ve ever heard discussed.”

He noted that despite Wednesday’s development, Riordan’s challenger, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D--Los Angeles), will no doubt continue to hammer on the subway issue in his attempt to unseat the mayor in April.

Indeed, during a walking tour of Ventura Boulevard on Tuesday, Hayden specifically attacked Riordan’s key role in persuading fellow MTA board members to vote in favor of a Valley Metro Red Line extension in October 1994.

“The Valley got sold a bill of goods on the subway,” Hayden declared.

The east-west Valley subway would hook up with the Red Line subway from North Hollywood to downtown, a separate project which is now under construction.

Riordan’s changing position on the east-west Valley rail line actually traces further back than 1994. During his 1993 mayoral campaign, he came out in favor of a monorail above the Ventura Freeway, Antonovich’s pet proposal.

Nearly unanimous support for a subway by Valley homeowner and business groups, however, convinced Riordan to switch sides, he said at the time. He also cited cost analyses that priced a subway competitively with a monorail-type system.

Following tunneling debacles and shrinking availability of federal funds, Riordan reversed field yet again, and now says he no longer believes new subway construction to be feasible anywhere in Los Angeles.

His new thinking led him last week to vote in favor of Councilman John Fasana’s proposal to drop the subway from its menu of options for cross-Valley transit. The panel also voted to urge legislators to repeal a state law requiring that any rail line in the North Hollywood area be located underground.

The MTA also cleared the way Wednesday to start digging a subway on the Eastside by hiring a North Hollywood-based consortium called JMA to supervise construction, thus resolving a raucous controversy that had ravaged its credibility with the public and the federal government.

The decision ended months of wrangling that had tied the board in knots, invited harsh scrutiny from the Clinton administration and is still the subject of an investigation by the agency’s inspector general.

A panel of independent experts hired for $375,000 had chosen JMA first among three bidders in August. But then-county transit chief Joseph E. Drew brushed aside their deliberations and recommended in October that the board choose Metro East Consultants, which the experts had ranked third.

Metro East employed several executives with campaign or former employment ties to influential MTA board member Richard Alatorre.

Drew’s recommendation sparked a furious protest. The board had deadlocked on choosing between the two in previous, highly acrimonious debates that included charges of corruption. Metro East was at one point disqualified by Drew after an agency auditor said he had discovered it made false statements in its bid.

On Wednesday, Metro East was given a one-hour hearing to clear its name--and the board rescinded the auditor’s findings after impassioned statements from its attorney. Its one last chance came when the mayor proposed the decision be sent to one more panel of experts headed by a University of Alberta civil-engineering professor.

But board members appeared clearly in a mood to put the divisive decision behind them, and voted 8 to 1, with Alatorre the lone dissenter; Riordan and one other board member abstained.

“The MTA did the right thing, but only after exhausting all the alternatives,” Yaroslavsky said.