The Decision on Subway Funding Will Shape the Future of Mass Transit

To build or not to build more subways?

That is the question facing Los Angeles County voters Tuesday when they decide the fate of a sweeping ballot measure that would prevent the use of the local sales tax to build subway lines.

Proposition A seeks to prevent new subway construction by outlawing the use of the county’s 1% transit sales tax to plan, design, construct or operate new subway lines.

Unless other sources of funding can be found, there would be no subway extensions to the Eastside, Mid-City or anywhere else in the county once the Metro Rail subway to the San Fernando Valley is finished in 2000.

It is a landmark decision that will shape the future of mass transit in Los Angeles for many years to come.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a subway supporter for most of his political career, is leading the anti-subway campaign. He argues that county taxpayers cannot shoulder an increasingly large share of the cost of new subway lines. “We can’t afford this anymore. We can’t sustain this,” he said. “At $300 million a mile, you’re not going to build many miles of subway.”

Yaroslavsky, a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, said it is time to pursue less expensive avenues to provide mass transit, including light-rail lines, exclusive busways and improved bus service.

The initiative has been packaged as a vote of no confidence in the MTA’s handling of the problem-plagued $5-billion subway project.

Opponents of the measure have had difficulty making their case without appearing to defend the troubled MTA in the process. Many longtime subway supporters, including most of the MTA board,

have backed away from taking a leading role against the initiative. No argument against the measure was even submitted for the voters’ pamphlet.

Although she sees the anti-subway measure as bad public policy, Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, vice chairwoman of the MTA, believes that the anti-subway measure will pass Tuesday because “people will vote against the MTA.”

The formidable task of fighting the measure has fallen to Supervisor Gloria Molina, a coalition of Eastside activists, construction trade unions and the Sierra Club, who say it is shortsighted and inappropriate to eliminate the subway option. They were joined in the closing days by Latino members of Congress and the state Legislature who represent the Eastside, plus a number of Los Angeles council members.

Molina, who is also an MTA board member, is particularly critical of Yaroslavsky for pushing an initiative campaign that will deny the transit-dependent Eastside a subway after he fought for years to get the Red Line to his district.

Yaroslavsky, Molina said, is “just surfing on this political wave, hoping it gets him to higher office.”

It is a charge that Yaroslavsky denies. The supervisor admits that he has “not been an anti-subway ideologue in the past” but says he now believes that costly subways are not the answer to the mass transit needs of sprawling Los Angeles. “After billions of dollars, all we have to show for it is a skeletal system,” he said.

Yaroslavsky said spending an additional $1.1 billion to build a three-mile-long subway line to Boyle Heights will not serve major Eastside destinations, including County-USC Medical Center or the Cal State L.A. campus.

The measure does not rule out a future extension of the subway if it is built at ground level or on an aerial structure. “All we are saying is you cannot use sales tax revenues to build subway,” he said.

Late in the campaign, the Bus Riders Union, which had originally opposed the proposition, switched sides and endorsed it. The group’s leader, Eric Mann, said the initiative will “end slush fund contracts to design subways” and free up money to reduce overcrowding and improve bus service.

Beyond the subway provision, the measure would require an annual independent audit of the MTA’s spending of the transit sales tax. It also would establish a five-member citizens committee to monitor the MTA’s compliance with voter-mandated restrictions on the use of that money.

The measure also would allow part of the sales tax now set aside for highway-related transit improvements to be spent for transit projects along railroad rights of way. The MTA owns several routes throughout the region, including the Exposition Boulevard right of way from South-Central Los Angeles to the Westside, and the Burbank-Chandler corridor across the San Fernando Valley.

Proposition A is the only countywide issue on Tuesday’s ballot. But local measures will be voted up or down in a number of cities. A variety of local and regional races also will be conducted for city councils, school boards, water boards and community colleges.