MTA’s Political Alliance Showing Some Cracks

Eastside politicians have about as much chance of halting subway construction to North Hollywood as the Clippers do of winning this season’s NBA championship.

But the frustrations expressed this week by Latino elected officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s recovery plan are bound to increase the MTA’s troubles in Washington on the eve of crucial funding decisions. At Wednesday’s MTA board meeting, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) demanded that the agency halt all subway construction if it is unwilling to set a date for resuming work on the Eastside extension.

As if MTA’s chronic funding problems weren’t enough, a ballot initiative sponsored by county Supervisor and MTA board member Zev Yaroslavsky to halt subway tunneling beyond North Hollywood has touched off this nasty cross-town political fight and threatened the fragile alliance in Sacramento and Washington that has kept millions of dollars flowing to Los Angeles.

Eastside politicians say Yaroslavsky’s initiative could backfire on the supervisor, who long has had his eye on the Los Angeles mayor’s office.

“If he wants to be mayor, I think he has to realize he can’t win only with Westside and Valley support,” said Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles). “He cannot afford to lose the Latino vote, which is going to be critical in any election for mayor.”

In defense of his initiative, Yaroslavsky said, “This is not about denying the Eastside or the Mid-City, or the east-west Valley, a line. . . . It’s about stabilizing the finances of the agency so that some form of mass transportation can be brought to each of these communities.”

Yaroslavsky’s initiative has caused a key supporter of the MTA to step back. Rep. Esteban Torres (D-Pico Rivera), a member of the influential House transportation appropriations subcommittee, said Thursday that he won’t support the $100 million in federal funds requested by the MTA for the North Hollywood subway extension.

“I will not be there for them,” he said, citing the initiative as the “last straw.” He added that the action is an effort to deny the Eastside “equity.”

When told about Torres’ shift, an MTA insider said Thursday, “It’s very, very discouraging.”

Representatives from the Eastside and Mid-City have supported subway funding in the expectation that the line would reach their districts, and they would be there for the ribbon-cutting.

Politics was a major reason that the first segment of the subway was not built straight from downtown to the Westside, along what planners considered the most logical route--parallel to one of the world’s busiest freeways, the Santa Monica, and to one of the nation’s busiest bus routes, Wilshire Boulevard.

Instead, the decision was made more than a decade ago to route the subway to Hollywood, to the Valley, to the Eastside and to the Mid-City--in order to serve a larger number of different political constituents.

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Torres joined Becerra on Thursday in suggesting that the MTA consider halting the $300-million-per-mile subway extension to North Hollywood, even though it is more than half finished. The remaining money could be spent to bring less expensive mass transit projects to more neighborhoods, they suggested.

Roybal-Allard didn’t go as far as her colleagues in suggesting a halt to the North Hollywood project, but said of both the MTA and Yaroslavsky: “They totally ignore the Eastside. In other words, it’s finish North Hollywood. Stop all [subway] period. There is nothing in the language that recognizes the critical transportation needs of the Eastside. . . . It’s like the Eastside doesn’t even exist.”

Mayor Richard Riordan, who chairs the MTA board, said again Thursday: “It’s irresponsible to not complete what we start,” adding that stopping the North Hollywood subway leg would further damage the MTA’s credibility in Sacramento and Washington. “To stop in midstream is stupid.”

MTA officials also say if the North Hollywood subway extension is abandoned, the MTA would have to repay the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the project.

San Fernando Valley Councilman Hal Bernson, who serves on the MTA board, has said that the Eastside is being treated no differently than the Valley, which is now looking at a busway in lieu of an east-west subway because of the funding problems.

Yaroslavsky noted that the projected cost of a subway from Union Station to Boyle Heights is $1 billion--more, he noted, than it will cost to rebuild County-USC Medical Center, another project on which Yaroslavsky has clashed with Latino politicians.

“If you can build subways at $300 million a mile and you can build surface rail at $62 million a mile, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you can reach five times as many people in five times as many communities,” Yaroslavsky said.

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Roybal-Allard said the problem with Yaroslavsky’s initiative is that it eliminates subway construction as an option, even though MTA planners have said land acquisition for a busway or light-rail line would be as financially and environmentally costly as building a subway on the Eastside.

“We have never said, ‘only rail, and nothing else.’ My defense of rail has been based on MTA telling us that there is no viable mode of transportation other than rail on the Eastside,” she said.

“It really angers me,” she added, “when this initiative is coming from someone who got his rail . . . and then turns his back on the area that is the most transit-dependent in Los Angeles.”

Yaroslavsky responded angrily to questions on whether his initiative is driving a wedge between white, black and Latino communities and affluent voters and the poor.

“This is not a class issue,” he said. “The poorest people in this county, the most dependent on public transit, have suffered the most from the mismanagement of the MTA.”

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Yaroslavsky said the push for the Eastside subway comes from elected officials allied with subway contractors, engineering firms and property owners and is “not about serving the poor [who] suffer from the overcrowding and breakdown of MTA buses.”

MTA officials were scratching their heads Thursday trying to figure out how to deal with the latest crisis.

One MTA advisor was looking toward Rep. Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles), a longtime supporter of the subway, to try to hold together the coalition. “I do think the only hope we have is if Julian Dixon can get these guys to reach some kind of compromise,” said the advisor.

But Becerra said: “If the MTA board wants Latino lawmakers to assist them, then their concerns must be taken seriously and not ignored.”