Bitterly Split Board Selects New MTA Chief

Huddled in secret for more than three hours Wednesday, a bitterly divided Metropolitan Transportation Authority board--acting without public discussion--chose a top construction company executive to take over Los Angeles County’s troubled transit agency.

At the insistence of Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who controls four votes on the 13-member panel, the board agreed to offer the MTA’s vacant chief executive officer’s post to Bechtel Corp. executive Theodore G. Weigle Jr., sources told The Times.

The choice raises potential conflicts of interest because Bechtel has millions of dollars in contracts with the MTA. According to one board member, Weigle “will abstain on issues involving Bechtel.”

Weigle, who joined Bechtel in 1990, heads the San Francisco-based multinational firm’s oversight of a new subway system under construction in Athens.

Although the board formally voted to negotiate a contract with Weigle in a closed-door “executive session,” no announcement of the decision was made when the panel reconvened in public later Wednesday afternoon.

Riordan’s choice of Weigle to head the problem-plagued $3-billion transit agency was strongly opposed by several board members during what one source present during the discussions called a “loud shouting match.” A minority of board members objected strenuously to voting because the full board had not had a chance to interview the candidates or independently check their references.

“There was a group of people who did not want to rush into this,” one source said.

In the end, however, their concerns were overridden by a solid majority of the board. Only three members voted against Weigle, while one abstained.

The majority felt, a source said, “it was very necessary to try to get a good, strong CEO in there to take over” as quickly as possible.

Weigle was the leader among three finalists under discussion during the board session in a back room sealed off from the public by MTA security officers. The closed-door discussion followed interviews with the finalists at another secret MTA board meeting earlier this month. There was no public notice of that first meeting, as required by state law, Assistant County Counsel David Kelsey confirmed.

Before joining Bechtel, which is providing construction management and engineering services to the Greek company building the Athens subway, Weigle was the head of the Regional Transportation Authority in Chicago. He also has served as an official of the federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration and of Washington’s Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

Sources confirmed that he was selected over two other finalists: Ed Colby, the director of the Metro-Dade County Transit Agency in Miami, and Lisa Mills, assistant chief executive officer at the Orange County Transportation Authority.

The new transit chief--the third in the MTA’s tumultuous four-year history--will be the board’s latest hope to turn around an agency fraught with problems, including cost overruns and construction mishaps on the Metro Rail subway project and the need for court-ordered improvements in the nation’s most crowded bus system.

Among the immediate crises facing the new transit chief will be how the MTA will comply with a federal court settlement requiring it to put more buses on the street while still meeting binding commitments to build the massive Red Line subway and extend the Blue Line from downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena.

The next top executive also will confront demands from federal transportation officials that the MTA resolve financial and construction problems with the $5.9-billion subway or risk losing federal transit dollars. The U.S. government is paying for about half of the underground rail project.

In a “recovery plan,” presented to federal officials in January but rejected in recent weeks, the MTA proposed delaying the opening of subway service to the first station in East Los Angeles for two more years until 2004 and the Mid-City line for seven years to 2009.

Yet the agency is seeking funding to extend the rail line deeper into the Eastside, across the San Fernando Valley and to complete the Mid-City project.

The previous MTA chief, Joseph Drew, resigned in December after less than a year on the job, saying political infighting and “public hypercriticism” of him and his staff made the job an impossible task for anyone.

Shortly afterward, the agency’s construction chief, Stanley Phernambucq, also resigned over what he described as the “dysfunctional relationship that exists between and among board members and our public works program.”

The first chief executive, Franklin White, characterized the agency as an out-of-control “money train” when he was fired in 1995 after 32 months on the job.

With 13 bosses, each with his or her own political agenda and pet projects, the top MTA official is under constant pressure. All of that was evident Wednesday, when the board convened its public session more than two hours late and quickly became embroiled in a debate over efforts to speed construction of a light-rail line to Pasadena.

The move to seek a state loan, shift funds from other projects and defer the use of local funds to complete the $804-million project was referred back to committee on a 7-6 vote.

That debate underscored again the sharp competition that exists among board members over various rail projects across the nation’s most populous county.

County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, joined by her colleagues Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky, pleaded with their fellow MTA board members not to go along with a three-point plan to keep the 13.6-mile Pasadena Blue Line on track. Interim MTA chief Linda Bohlinger and her staff asked the board to approve: a request that Sacramento advance as much state funding as possible while deferring the MTA’s obligation to match the money until the end of the project; a second request that the state shift $77 million to the Pasadena line from other projects while the MTA does the same; and an effort to borrow $54 million from Sacramento, to be repaid in 2006 or later.

Both Burke and Yaroslavsky demanded to know how the “recovery plan” for Pasadena had been altered since it was considered by an MTA committee last week.

Yaroslavsky asked how the board could act “if we can’t trust our staff, which we can’t.”

He also called the revised proposal a “scheme” and said it was exactly the kind of financial “shell game” that had earned the wrath of federal transit officials.

With deep rifts apparent in the MTA board, a tentatively planned Washington “summit meeting” with top Clinton administration officials was delayed at least two weeks until late May.

Times staff writers Jim Newton and Richard Simon contributed to this story.