Hayden to Push Ahead With Bill to Split Valley From MTA

Despite receiving a chilly reception from fellow lawmakers, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) vowed Wednesday to keep alive a bill to break off a section of the MTA and create a separate agency to govern transportation in the San Fernando Valley.

After the bill came under heavy fire from the bus operators’ union and lobbyists for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at a hearing of the Senate Transportation Committee, Hayden on Tuesday declined to bring the bill up for a vote. But he said Wednesday he would present it at the committee’s next meeting in three weeks.

“I think the bill is very much alive,” Hayden said. “I prefer to think of it as a bill that needs a lot of diagnosis.”

The bill would transfer all MTA authority over transit within the Valley’s boundaries, plus MTA staff and property, to a new agency with its own 15-member board.

Hayden said such a new agency, with authority to plan and operate buses, rail and other mass transit projects in the Valley, would better serve the area than the MTA.

“At the end of the day, the Valley’s been shortchanged,” he said.

But several key members of the committee voiced strong opposition to the bill.

Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco), said the new agency would be weakened by a structural flaw he says ruined the MTA--it would both plan and run transit service, which he says sets up a conflict between bus and rail interests.

Without a new approach, he said, the bill “would never pass muster in my committee.”

Lobbyists for the MTA and bus driver unions also argued against the bill.

MTA officials noted that the agency--along with the Los Angeles city Department of Transportation--already is studying the possibility of creating a semiautonomous “zone” for the Valley. That concept envisions a board that would probably privatize bus service for the area.

Hayden blasted that idea as “a fruitless, frustrating waste of time,” because the administrators of the zone would still be subject to the authority of the MTA board.

But he pledged to revise portions of his bill and bring it before the committee at its next meeting. That meeting is the last before a Senate deadline on bills to clear the related “policy” committees.

“He is running out of time,” Kopp said. “He’s got one more bite of the apple.”