MTA Should Get Funds for New Buses, Panel Says

After hearing Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief Julian Burke declare that his agency has changed course, a key California Transportation Commission panel voted Tuesday to allow the MTA to use $90 million in state funds to buy new buses instead of reserving it for subway lines to the Eastside and Mid-City.

With work on the two subway projects halted, the commission’s public transit committee heard Burke say the MTA wants to redirect the state money to help defray the cost of a massive program to buy 2,095 new buses over the next six years.

Committee chairman David Fleming, a prominent San Fernando Valley attorney, praised the MTA’s new attitude toward buses during a meeting at the state Capitol.

“We are pleased to see that finally the MTA is beginning to address the true transit needs of . . . the transit-dependent,” Fleming said.

But Fleming made it clear that the pressure from Sacramento to ensure that the MTA completes its projects is not off. “MTA has a responsibility to show us that they can complete and operate each one,” he said.

Burke said that before the agency looks to expand and change, “we’re going to make sure we can operate what we’ve got.”

The committee also took the first step toward shifting $257.9 million in state funds from the MTA to a new agency created to build a light rail line from Union Station to Pasadena.

But the money will not be transferred until the new Pasadena Blue Line Construction Authority, which begins work in January, returns to the commission in late March with a complete plan to build the rail line with the funds available.

The committee also rededicated $134 million in state money to help the MTA finish the subway to North Hollywood.

The committee decisions, which are to be ratified by the full commission today, come 10 months after the state panel told the MTA to find another use for the transit funds reserved for the Eastside and Mid-City subway and the Pasadena project or risk losing the state money entirely.

Burke told the panel that the MTA has “adequately if not totally complied” with the commission’s direction. He said the MTA is beginning to focus on alternative projects that will assist the transit- dependent “not only where they live, but also where they want to go.”

After MTA officials admitted that the agency has failed to comply with a federal court order to reduce overcrowding on the nation’s second-largest bus system, the MTA board of directors last month approved the massive $817-million program to replace most of its aging and problem-plagued bus fleet.

Although the MTA board did not approve Burke’s proposal for a countywide system of rapid buses that make only limited stops and special equipment to override traffic signals, Burke told the commission the idea still is very much alive.

He said that longer trips would be considered first, that no corridors are ready to go yet, and that it would take about a year to develop the first faster bus lines.

Former Assembly Transportation Committee Chairman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles), who was elected to the state Senate last month, expressed concern that the rapid bus lines are experimental and unlikely to solve the problems that led to the consent decree.

And Murray objected to the state money being set aside for the Pasadena project. The Blue Line from downtown to the San Gabriel Valley “should compete with all of the other geographic corridors,” Murray said.

In the interest of compromise, Fleming suggested that the committee place the state funds in escrow until the new agency produces the plan for building the line within available funds.

Eric Mann, head of the Bus Riders Union which has waged a relentless courtroom and political battle for better bus service, urged the commission not to transfer the state money set aside for the Pasadena project. “The Blue Line money is a competing claim for the consent decree,” he said.

After the meeting, Mann said the escrow compromise moved things in “a somewhat positive direction for us” because it did not completely commit the money.

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Times staff writer Amy Pyle reported from Sacramento; Jeffrey L. Rabin from Los Angeles.