Agency Moves to Spin Off Bus Service

With frustration building over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s financial problems, the agency’s board moved Wednesday to take the first step toward a wholesale spinoff of its bus services to smaller, subregional agencies.

The motion to prepare plans to divest the enormous transit agency of one of its most important functions grew from a proposal by San Fernando Valley lawmakers looking to create a separate transit zone for the Valley.

Fed up with what they see as waste at MTA headquarters, Valley representatives and business groups have for some time been pushing the idea of a separate transit zone run by a local board and funded by the MTA.

Now the MTA will consider extending this idea countywide. That would shrink operating costs and improve service on all MTA bus lines, argued John Fasana, a Duarte city councilman who sponsored Wednesday’s motion to split the MTA’s transit bureaucracy into subregional zones.

The MTA bus system “is poorly maintained and not innovative,” Fasana said.

“This issue’s time has come,” said fellow board member and Long Beach City Councilwoman Jenny Oropeza, who co-sponsored the motion. “The Valley . . . has seen the light ahead of us.”

Transit zones would continue to receive funding from the MTA, but would be governed by local boards with the power to make spending decisions in their areas.

In a sense, the creation of transit zones would be an echo of the city’s past, when buses and trolley cars were the purview of local governments and private operators.

The potential benefits of transit zones range from bicycle racks on buses to cleaner seats and more polite drivers, Fasana and Oropeza contended.

Their motion, which gives MTA staff members three months to come up with a divestiture plan, passed by a unanimous voice vote.

The transit-zone idea joins a growing body of proposals that, taken in sum, compose an assault on the very structure of the MTA.

These range from “piecemeal secession”--as one legislative aide called the Valley transit-zone proposal--to full-scale dismantling of the transit agency.

The board’s decision Wednesday to suspend long-awaited rail-line projects reflects some of the funding problems that have prompted these efforts, underscoring the depth of the agency’s troubles in the eyes of some critics.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), for instance, is drafting a motion to create a new transit authority serving only the Valley.

A Valley transit authority would be autonomous, and would not be subject to any MTA oversight, as its funding would come directly from fares and taxes.

Also, Hayden, who is among those who say the billions of dollars the MTA has spent on subways would have been better spent on buses, is also sponsoring legislation to put the MTA into receivership, said his chief of staff, Rocky Rushing.

“We have tried to reform the MTA through tinkering, but the problems are so fundamental it seems like it’s impossible,” Rushing said.

Buses are one reason the MTA exists, though not the only one.

Operating about 1,600 buses in the county accounts for about $600 million of the MTA’s total yearly operating and capital budget of $2.8 billion, MTA officials said.

“If you . . . transfer responsibilities to these other zones, it certainly would put us out of business” in the area of bus transit, MTA spokesman Jim Smart said.

Creating separate transit zones would first require lengthy studies to prove such zones would produce substantial savings.

Much work is needed before such a conclusion could be reached, MTA officials say. Just settling the question of how much it costs to run buses in different areas is by itself a hefty task, said James Okazaki, chief of transit for the city of Los Angeles’ transportation department.

Okazaki has been studying the possibility of a Valley transit zone at the behest of the City Council. The question is so nettlesome that Okazaki is still trying to nail down the cost of running the Valley’s buses, which has been estimated at anywhere from $85 million per year to $120 million, he said.

The creation of a separate transit zone has one precedent: In 1987, the Foothill Transit agency was created in the San Gabriel Valley, uniting more than 20 cities that receive funding for buses from the MTA.

Foothill Transit has been successful in cutting costs, mostly because it has contracted out for services with companies that hire workers who are paid lower wages than MTA’s unionized workers, Smart contended.

About 80% of transit operating costs are labor-related, he added. If money is to be saved by reducing the wage bill, then the creation of transit zones could have serious consequences for MTA’s several thousand bus system employees, he said.

* NEWS ANALYSIS: Grandiose ideas finally collided with fiscal reality. A22