The MTA Must Make Its Case

Small wonder that Los Angeles Eastsiders have stepped to the front of the line of those who feel most aggrieved by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s decisions over the years. If you want to understand their anger, just take the short Red Line subway ride over to the MTA’s downtown headquarters.

Imagine that you showed up at the MTA tower last Friday morning around 9 a.m. You climbed out of the cavernous and mostly empty Union Station stop. You walked along the agency’s imported brick walkways, past imported marble and granite and dazzling polished metal, then into perhaps the finest public boardroom west of the Mississippi River. This was where you had to go to hear about how the MTA doesn’t have any money left to extend the subway to your part of town.

One of your congressmen, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) came to ask the MTA when it would release the “real” budget numbers. State legislators, including Assembly Transportation Committee Chairman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles), were on hand to conduct the hearing on the MTA’s finances. But not a single member of the MTA board of directors that had approved the financial restructuring plan excluding the Eastside subway bothered to show up to defend that decision. Supervisor Gloria Molina was the only board member who did show up, and she opposed the plan.

Acting MTA chief executive Julian Burke was there, and should have brought a name plate with the words “sacrificial lamb” etched upon it.

This is the sorry state in which MTA finds itself: It projects a $700-million deficit for several years, even after restructuring and cost-cutting. And this is with just two goals in mind. One is to complete the Red Line subway to North Hollywood and the other is to meet the terms of a court consent decree to greatly improve bus service. Achieving both is hardly a given with the agency awash in red ink.

Promoting the MTA is a tough sales job, and many people on the Eastside and elsewhere feel the whole effort is a snow job. Yet the irony is that this plan does make sense. The North Hollywood subway extension to the east San Fernando Valley is more than 50% complete and it would cost millions of dollars just to draw it to a halt. The other part of the plan calls for experts to determine the best options to improve mass transit to the rest of the county, including Pasadena, the Eastside, Mid-City and the bulk of the Valley, and that goal could require dedicated busways, shuttles, above-ground light-rail systems and more. All are sensible, but not now affordable.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky is pressing for an ill-advised ballot initiative that would stop all future subway tunneling beyond North Hollywood. Transportation agencies with their own mass transit projects around the country are waiting for Los Angeles to stumble again. Not only was there talk of placing the MTA into state receivership at Friday’s hearing, but on who the receiver might to be.

Voting for the restructuring plan is not enough. The MTA board has to take its show on the road, not only here but in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C. It’s absolutely necessary, but the audiences will be tough.