Subway Backers Miss the Train to Voting Booths

Is there anyone left to speak for a larger subway system for Los Angeles?

The answer is no, at least not where it will count most--on the November ballot.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has qualified an initiative for the ballot that would end local funding for a subway beyond the one already under construction through Hollywood to North Hollywood.

Although the initiative has drawn invective from some lawmakers who do not want to foreclose the possibility of subway extensions to their districts, there is no organized campaign against it.

Opponents are so disheartened and in such disarray that they ignored the Aug. 11 deadline to file an argument to be printed on the ballot urging voters to reject the measure.

In effect, the opponents conceded defeat months before the election.

“If this isn’t a slam-dunk, I haven’t seen one yet,” said political consultant Joe Cerrell, who has been active in Los Angeles politics for 40 years but is not involved in this issue.

Usually, he said, at least “some nitwits” will take the lead in writing a ballot argument, if for no other reason than to get their names circulated at public expense on sample ballots distributed to all county voters. “This time there’s not even the, quote, nitwits, unquote, who want to see their names in print. . . . Where are the people who are upset about no subways? Where are the people who are upset it’s not going to go into East L.A.?”

Because of opponents’ inaction, every voter in Los Angeles County will receive mail on only one side of the subway question. The sample ballot will contain only the argument advanced by Yaroslavsky, leaving voters to conclude that no public figure cared enough about the subway system, which has been a key part of the transit debate in Los Angeles for two decades, to file a rebuttal.

Yaroslavsky, who is positioning himself to ride a wave of public disgust with subway cost overruns into a possible campaign for the mayoralty in 2001, also plans to send voters a mailer promoting himself and the initiative, which he is selling as a “2-by-4” that voters can use to “knock some sense into the MTA.”

Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke--who briefly promoted an alternative that would have barred subway extensions for six years, by which time the MTA’s financial problems might have been straightened out--called the permanent ban a tragedy because it would forever preclude use of sales tax money for tunneling to solve anticipated gridlock in Eastside and Mid-City areas.

But she concluded that it would be a “waste of money and energy” to fight the initiative now, given the torrents of bad publicity the MTA’s subway building efforts have received. Burke said she believes the MTA is held in such low regard that any ballot argument against the initiative would be widely misinterpreted as an attempt to justify unjustifiable problems of “fraud . . . and poor decision-making.”

Rep. Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles), a stalwart supporter of extending the subway to the Mid-City area, said by telephone from Washington that he had expected local opponents of the Yaroslavsky initiative to take the lead.

The leading Washington-based champion of an Eastside subway extension, Rep. Esteban Torres (D-Pico Rivera), did not respond to an interview request.

Burke had been joined in her proposal by Supervisor Gloria Molina, who also could not be reached Tuesday. Their plan would have put a rival initiative on the ballot forbidding the use of sales tax revenues for the subway for six years--a period in which insufficient federal money is expected to be available to help fund subway extensions anyway. Burke and Molina let the proposal die when it failed to receive majority backing from the MTA board, on which all five county supervisors and Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan sit.

The subway contractors who profited from the West’s largest public works project also have chosen not to participate in a campaign against Yaroslavsky’s initiative, a lobbyist for many of them said.

Barna Szabo said many contractors have lost interest. Some decided that the subway was likely to be downsized and have focused their efforts on getting jobs elsewhere. Others have searched for a political champion in vain.

“There is a collective exhaustion on the part of the contracting community,” Szabo said, “because of . . . watching politics tear apart the fabric of the overall transit plan. . . . I’m very disappointed there won’t be a full debate. I think everybody is hiding in the bushes.”

Dan Farkas, assistant chief of staff to Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre, said he too was unaware of any organized campaign to defeat the Yaroslavsky measure. Alatorre is an MTA board member and leading proponent of an Eastside subway extension.

“There’s nothing being generated by our office other than statements to the effect that we think [the initiative is] ill-advised and it doesn’t show foresight,” Farkas said.

That leaves the field wide open for Yaroslavsky. Deriding the subway system as a $6-billion boondoggle that threatens to bankrupt the MTA, the supervisor has said he is bringing the matter to the voters as a way of forcing the agency to focus on less costly light rail projects and bus system improvements.

His initiative would ban the use of the linchpin of subway funding--the county’s 1 cent per dollar transit sales tax--for future subway construction.

The ballot argument in favor of the measure is co-signed by Supervisor Mike Antonovich; Los Angeles City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski; Joel Fox, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.; and Rose Castaneda, identified as a public transit user.

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MTA Construction on the Line

Proponents of an initiative that would limit subway construction in Los Angeles to the Red Line from downtown to North Hollywood have submitted the following as part of their argument. The county will print it on sample ballots. Opponents, who would like to preserve the option of future Red Line extensions to the Eastside and mid-city, are so discouraged by their prospects that they have not even bothered to write a rebuttal.

Los Angeles County needs mass transit. We don’t have it because of waste and mismanagement at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Cost overruns, shoddy construction work, sinkholes in Hollywood and questionable contracting practices have made MTA a national laughingstock. Unfortunately, the joke is on the taxpayers who have little to show for years of effort and billions of dollars in spending.

If you’re tired of the MTA’s sorry performance, Vote YES on Measure xxxxxx.

Stop MTA from sending sales taxes on future subway construction, while steering MTA towards less expensive alternatives such as light rail and expanded bus service.

Source: Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk