Funding Panel Deals Setback to Subway

In a potentially serious setback for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a key congressional panel recommended Wednesday that the Los Angeles subway receive $30 million in the next fiscal year--far less than the $100 million sought to continue building the Metro Rail project to North Hollywood.

If approved by Congress, the recommendation of the U.S. Senate Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee could slow down the project or force the county’s debt-ridden transit agency to borrow even more money to finish the rail line. The MTA already is struggling with its $7-billion debt.

“I’m extremely disappointed,” MTA Chief Executive Officer Julian Burke said, adding, however, “I don’t think it is the last word on what our appropriation will be.”

Burke will travel to Washington again as the MTA steps up its lobbying of the House Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, which is due to make its own funding recommendation, possibly as early as next Thursday.

The transit chief declined to speculate on the MTA’s plans should the agency end up with its lowest annual appropriation this decade.

County Supervisor and MTA board member Zev Yaroslavsky said that if the federal government fails to live up to previous commitments to help pay for the rail project, “the longer it will take and the more money it will cost.”

And that, in turn, could place additional burdens on state and local taxpayers, he said. “It puts more financial stress on an already stressed-out agency.”

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Even without its nationally reported troubles, the MTA faces fierce competition for funds, finding itself like its bus riders--forced to elbow through the crowd, in its case not for a seat but for a place in the funding line.

The House panel, which in the past has been more generous than the Senate group, will offer its recommendation and then a conference committee will negotiate a figure. Historically, conferees often have split the difference between the House and Senate recommendations.

For the current fiscal year, which ends in September, the Senate allocated $51 million for the subway, the House proposed $76 million, and the MTA ended up with $61.5 million.

Next year’s low number from the Senate committee wasn’t the only bad news. The Senate panel’s $30-million recommendation includes $6 million in new money. The other $24 million is money left over from this year’s appropriation that the MTA was already counting on. That money was originally earmarked for the now-suspended subway extension to the Eastside.

The Senate subcommittee’s action increases pressure on the Eastside’s congressional delegation, which had threatened to withhold support for continued funding of the subway to North Hollywood unless alternatives to the eastward subway extension were found.

Beyond the small appropriation, the Senate subcommittee’s appropriations bill contained sharp criticism of the subway project. “Over the 17-year history of federal funding, the Los Angeles Metro Rail project has been troubled by cost overruns, repeated redesigns, corruption, mismanagement, engineering failures, tunneling accidents, and political infighting,” it said.

And in a stunning rebuke, the bill also says “the committee is supportive of efforts within Congress and at the local level to minimize further loss of federal investments in this project.”

An aide to U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said the committee chairman, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), and his staff attributed the low number to “adverse publicity coupled with local discontent” with the subway project.

Burke attributed the low number to fierce competition for federal funds. “I’m just fearful that we are caught in a situation where there is not enough money to satisfy all of the political needs,” he said. “I really don’t have any doubt that this problem relates primarily to the competition and not to any black mark . . . about the MTA.”

Mayor Richard Riordan, chairman of the MTA board, remains optimistic that more money than the Senate committee recommended will be coming to Los Angeles by the time President Clinton signs the final appropriation bill.

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The Senate panel divvied up about $900 million Wednesday to about 80 mass-transit projects nationwide. Rail projects in New Jersey and Utah got the largest amounts per project--about $70 million each. California got the second-highest amount after Texas, with $92 million urged for rail projects in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco.

Work on the $1.3-billion segment of the subway from Hollywood through the Santa Monica Mountains to North Hollywood is two-thirds complete. The 6.3-mile-long addition to the Red Line, which begins at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, is now scheduled to open in May 2000.

The federal government is paying about half of the nearly $5-billion subway project, with county and state taxpayers covering the rest.