Riordan, Foe Agree Buses Key to Transit Future

During the tenure of Mayor Richard Riordan, tunneling for the region’s subway system has periodically ground to a halt, residents have mounted campaigns to protest construction noise, the federal government has cracked the whip over mismanagement and soaring costs, one head of the county transit agency was sacked and another quit, and a sinkhole caused by construction swallowed up a chunk of Hollywood.

Beset by controversy and cost-overruns, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority threatens to make the Los Angeles Police Department look like a bastion of calm and consensus.

As the mayor’s race gathers steam, Riordan and his main challenger, state Sen. Tom Hayden, agree on at least one thing: The future of Los Angeles public transportation rests largely with more buses. But they sharply disagree on the source of the MTA’s problems and the route out of them.

Over the past four years, Riordan has weathered the problems afflicting the agency with curious immunity. Although he is a member of the MTA board and appoints three others to the 13-person panel, the mayor accepts little responsibility for the agency’s foibles.

He argues that his power is limited because he doesn’t control his appointees’ votes, and offers a variety of proposals to rescue the MTA from its problems. In an interview last week, Riordan said he believes there is enough waste in bus operations spending to wring out $100 million for transit improvements.

Riordan’s views on buses represent the latest development in an evolving set of perspectives on transportation issues. He has jumped from position to position--sometimes supporting rail for the San Fernando Valley, other times voicing doubts about it--and occasionally surprising his own staff with his votes and pronouncements on sensitive policy matters.

All of that leaves Hayden salivating over his opponent’s record.

“The MTA is a terrible agency, just terrible,” Hayden said. “And he runs it.”

Riordan, according to Hayden, has set a tone in which “corruption and mismanagement” have been tolerated: “The mayor has a lot of explaining to do.”

But where the MTA’s woes appear to offer a soft spot in Riordan’s commanding lead over Hayden, in truth both candidates are struggling to articulate a convincing vision for construction of the city’s sprawling and troubled transit system. Both offer a mixture of firm proposals and softer suggestions. And though they agree on some points--Riordan and Hayden share a pessimism about the future of Los Angeles subways--their visions starkly contrast in other areas.

Riordan, who intends to formally announce his candidacy for reelection this week, would discuss his vision for Los Angeles transit for only 30 minutes for this article.

Hollywood Tunnel Moratorium Urged

Hayden, by contrast, talks a blue streak, but has difficulty settling on a clear set of priorities for rescuing local transit.

In fact, one solution Hayden has proposed is as startling as it is pessimistic: Pull the plug on the subway altogether. “My view is that they ought to stop it in its tracks,” he said in a 1995 interview.

Discussing the issue last week with The Times, Hayden struck a slightly softer position. He pledged, if elected, to order an immediate moratorium on subway construction, particularly a controversial tunnel through the Hollywood Hills. While the moratorium was in effect, Hayden would lead a delegation to Washington, where he would try to renegotiate a better deal with the federal government regarding Washington’s support for the public works project.

“The first thing we need to do is stop it, period,” Hayden said of the tunnel. “Moratorium.”

But Hayden did not say he would necessarily make the halt in tunnel construction permanent. Only after an outside expert had examined the MTA’s books and the progress of the tunnel would Hayden make a final decision about whether to finish that stage of the subway or to halt the construction for good. No matter what, Hayden stresses, the subway should proceed no farther than North Hollywood.

What is clear, however, is that Hayden believes that wherever it ultimately stops, the subway has been oversold, and that its role in the future of Los Angeles transportation will be marginal at best. “It was a mistake to begin with,” he said.

Instead, Hayden proposes a collection of smaller transportation links, combined with modified work hours to reduce rush-hour traffic, increased telecommuting to keep people off the road and strict management of the region’s growth to hold down the population.

That is a vision largely in keeping with Hayden’s world view--one of smaller, decentralized government, where neighborhood councils control local zoning and where strict campaign finance laws hold the influence of lobbyists in check. It is that idea--of severing the link between money and the transit system--that most engages Hayden’s passion.

“This is a gravy train,” he said of the embattled agency and its subway. “It’s not about transportation. It’s about money.”

With prosecutorial zeal, Hayden details the money links that he says have compromised Riordan’s role in managing the MTA. He cites Riordan’s investments in a company that received contracts from the MTA’s predecessor agency and accuses Riordan of accepting campaign contributions from companies that have gotten MTA business. And he charges that Riordan’s “back room maneuvers” have undermined the transit agency.

Riordan’s campaign staff dismissed those accusations as just the latest harangue from their pugnacious opponent. And they snapped back with accusations of their own.

“It’s important to remember that it was Tom Hayden, not the mayor, who helped to create the MTA,” said Todd Harris, a spokesman for Riordan’s reelection campaign. “And for one who has been so vocal a critic lately as Hayden has been, you might be surprised to learn that he rarely ever shows up to the meetings of the Senate Transportation Committee, on which he sits.”

Hayden’s spokesman, Rocky Rushing, defended the senator’s attendance record and called the notion that Hayden was responsible for creating the MTA “a silly argument at best.” He said Hayden’s only role in that process was to back the state legislation that merged the transit agency’s predecessor organizations.

“To say that that has anything to do with the current problems of the agency is ridiculous,” Rushing said.

No Attempt to Defend MTA

Riordan makes no attempt to defend the MTA. His frustrations with the agency have often been apparent; he helped oust former MTA chief Franklin E. White, for instance, after complaining bitterly about White’s management of the 9,000-employee agency.

“To be blunt,” Riordan said in 1994 of the agency’s leaders, “they drive me nuts.”

A year later, White was fired. Riordan, who said he liked White personally but considered him an ineffective manager who had failed to improve bus service, joined with all three of his appointees to the board in voting White out of his job.

White’s supporters accused the mayor of working behind the scenes to remove a manager who had done the unthinkable: oppose the mayor and his allies’ attempts to build expensive rail projects for which the agency lacked funds.

Management of the agency acquired new urgency over the past three months when the federal government threatened to yank its support of rail financing in the city unless MTA board members stopped trying to meddle in agency contracts. Although critics accuse the mayor of running the agency from the passenger seat of his Ford Explorer by cell phone, Riordan contended in his interview last week that he has a “low maintenance” relationship with its executive staff.

Still, the mayor does have a long relationship with the subway construction project that has so shaped the public’s perception of the agency. When he was in private practice as an attorney, he earned a handsome fee for negotiating with Southern Pacific for railroad rights of way. And the economic interest of his former law firm, Riordan & McKinzie, regarding transportation issues continues to this day: The MTA hired the firm to handle negotiations with the bus riders union that resulted in a whopping settlement for the plaintiffs.

Ticking off accomplishments in improving mobility around the traffic-clogged city over the past four years, Riordan emphasized his leading efforts at settling the bus riders’ lawsuit and the 1995 bus drivers’ strike.

The mayor seldom engages with vigor in edgy MTA board debates about contracts, and his ambivalence on policy surfaced last week in an interview. He said he favors finishing an extension under construction from Hollywood to the east San Fernando Valley, an extension to the Eastside and possibly to the Mid-City area.

“Once we finish what’s on the plate, I’m against future tunneling,” he said, adding that he considers the cost prohibitive.

Pressed on whether future rail extensions to the Eastside or Mid-City should be above or below ground, however, he concedes that he might be obligated to go along with engineers’ judgments that more tunneling is necessary.

“We have to work on getting fixed rail into the Mid-City, but I don’t think tunneling is the solution. I don’t think there is the money,” he said. “But obviously if there is no other way to do it, you have to do tunneling.”

The mayor prefers to talk about buses, stating that even if all current rail projects are built as expected they will carry little more than 1% of commuters 10 years from now. He envisions a future in which a vast, flexible network of cheap shuttles would pick up workers at their neighborhood street corners and deposit them on express buses. Commuters would then zoom to work centers like downtown and Burbank in special freeway busways, and be transported to their offices in more shuttles.

Why hasn’t he been able to push these ideas already?

He blames the federal government’s rigid rules on the use of money it has designated for rail, and vows to work over the next four years to pry more bus money out of Washington. And he notes that he inherited the subway project and its problems from his predecessor.

“The bottom line,” Riordan said, “is you have to play the cards dealt to you.”

* SUBWAY WORKER KILLED: A Red Line subway construction worker was killed in an accident. B1

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On the Record

Here is a look at statements by the leading candidates in the mayoral race.

THE RHETORIC

Mayor Richard Riordan: The mayor says he does not support underground tunneling and believes the MTA should concentrate on improving bus service rather than building more rail lines. He says he believes that the agency should encourage the federal government to allow the MTA to spend money designated for rail on buses, and that when current underground rail projects are complete only aboveground lines should be considered.

State Sen. Tom Hayden: For years, Hayden has derided the MTA as a corrupt, mismanaged agency whose effectiveness has been compromised by lobbyists, campaign contributions and powerful political interests. He accuses it of over-emphasizing subways and rail over cheaper proposals for expanding bus operations. “These emerging crises . . . underscore the need for clearer priorities between rail and bus service before the escalating rail budget, like a tapeworm, feeds on a weakened bus system that already is the most overcrowded in the nation,” Hayden said in a 1994 report on the MTA.

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THE RECORD

Mayor Richard Riordan: The mayor has changed his mind at least three times on whether the subway should be built across the San Fernando Valley and to the Eastside and Mid-City areas. In 1993, he favored building a monorail over the Ventura Freeway to move commuters east and west across the Valley, but a year later he voted to build an underground line about four miles north to serve the same travelers. Last month, he changed his position again--voting to eliminate money to design an east-west underground rail in the Valley.

State Sen. Tom Hayden: As a state senator, Hayden supported the legislation that created the MTA’s governing structure, a move that Riordan backers say compromises Hayden’s current criticism of the agency. Hayden once supported subways as a transportation plan for Los Angeles, but now is a determined advocate of a “less expensive, more flexible set of alternatives, including jitney buses, altered work hours and telecommuting.’

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THE RESPONSE:

Mayor Richard Riordan: “Making improvements in bus service is my No. 1 priority.”

State Sen. Tom Hayden: “I once had this warm, fuzzy idea of subways, but that was long gone before they started tunneling.”