State OKs MTA Plan for North Hollywood Subway

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority won state approval Tuesday for a six-year, $1.9-billion plan designed to help keep subway construction to North Hollywood on track and to fund other projects, including the Alameda Corridor and freeway carpool lanes.

The California Transportation Commission’s approval of the MTA’s spending plan was an important step forward in transit chief Julian Burke’s efforts to keep a promise to federal officials to open the North Hollywood subway extension by 2000.

With the state allocating an additional $134 million for the subway extension, the MTA can turn its attention to lobbying Congress to provide $100 million in federal funds this year for the project.

The fact that the MTA could find money for an assortment of new projects might surprise those who have followed the agency’s financial travails. Funds for the project come from state and federal gas taxes.

The spending plan also is an example of the influence of politics on transit decisions. MTA officials could have used the money to restart one of the rail projects mothballed this year. But MTA officials, already criticized by some for spending too much of the money on the subway, saw a need to provide a mix of transportation projects--including highway improvements--and to spread them around the county.

The spending plan includes $150 million for the Alameda Corridor to speed the movement of cargo out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach; $259 million to add carpool lanes to the San Diego Freeway between the Marina and Santa Monica freeways, the Santa Ana Freeway between Rosecrans and Florence avenues, the San Bernardino Freeway between the Orange Freeway and the San Bernardino County line, and the Antelope Valley Freeway between Escondido Canyon Road and Pearblossom Highway.

Funds also are provided to improve the Santa Monica Boulevard on-ramps onto the San Diego Freeway to eliminate a traffic bottleneck.

The MTA still faces a critical meeting in December, the deadline set by the commission for the agency to come up with a plan for spending about $400 million on transit improvements to the areas where rail lines have been put on hold--the Eastside, Mid-City, Pasadena and the San Fernando Valley.

If the MTA fails to come up with a plan, state officials have threatened to take the money away from the agency and decide for themselves what projects to fund in Los Angeles County.