SPECIAL REPORT * As critics move to cut subway funding, supporters deride the measure as shortsighted. The MTA awaits voters’ decision because . . . : Approval of Prop. A Would Chart a New Course for Transportation

On the surface, Proposition A on Los Angeles County’s November ballot is a simple measure: It is a vote of no confidence in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s handling of the $5-billion Metro Rail subway project.

But beneath the surface, voters are being asked to make a far-reaching decision about the direction of mass transit in America’s most auto-dependent region.

Practically speaking, Proposition A’s passage will end subway building in Los Angeles by forbidding use of the county’s transit sales tax on the planning, design, construction, finance or operation of any new subway extension.

If, as expected, voters approve the initiative, there will be no subway lines to the Eastside, Mid-City or anywhere else in the county after the Metro Red Line reaches the San Fernando Valley in the spring of 2000.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who has backed the subway for most of his political career, now is leading the anti-subway crusade. He no longer believes that $300-million-a-mile subway lines are the answer to the county’s transportation problems.

“Even if you believe subway is right, if you can’t afford it, what’s the point?” Yaroslavsky asked. “We can’t sustain this. Who are we trying to kid?”

Unable to change the MTA’s direction as a member of its board of directors, Yaroslavsky launched his initiative campaign last spring, hoping to capitalize on public disgust with the transit agency’s handling of the subway project--the construction debacles, the rampant cost overruns, the monumental debt, the outright corruption.

“We don’t have to do subway to build a mass rapid transit system in Los Angeles County,” he said. “From a taxpayers’ standpoint and a transportation standpoint, this is passe. We’ve long passed the point of rationality.”

Yaroslavsky argues that there are cheaper and more effective options, including construction of light rail lines, exclusive busways and improvements to the bus system that is the foundation of mass transit in the region. “It’s not just ‘No subway,’ ” he said of the measure. “It’s ‘Yes’ to everything else.”

So Yaroslavsky is calling on the county’s voters, who approved transit sales taxes in 1980 and 1990, to once again intervene. “Let’s have the wisdom to know the course we are on is the wrong course, and let’s have the courage to change course,” he said.

It is not a hard sell. Subway defenders are hard to find. Nowadays, most of the elected officials on the MTA board would like to put as much distance as possible between themselves and their votes to pursue the subway project.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, chairman of the MTA’s board, is trying to stay out of the initiative fight.

Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, vice chairwoman of the MTA and an outspoken defender of the subway generally and of the Mid-City line to her district in particular, is taking a low-key stance. She hopes that one day the county’s voters again will embrace the subway.

Though the Bus Riders Union, the Sierra Club, construction trade unions and Eastside activists are opposing the “MTA Reform and Accountability Act,” as Proposition A is called, there is no organized campaign against the measure. Opponents did not even bother to write an argument against the measure for the voters pamphlet.

“Trying to defend the MTA at this point is impossible,” said Supervisor Gloria Molina. “There is no doubt the subway has been an unbelievable embarrassment. It has been very, very poorly managed.”

Molina, who also serves on the MTA board, said defeating Yaroslavsky’s measure is “going to be very, very tough.”

But, she argues, Yaroslavsky’s approach is “shortsighted and inappropriate” and will render a growing region incapable of solving its transportation problems.

The initiative campaign, like so many issues in Los Angeles, is fraught with political and ethnic overtones.

Molina and most Latino politicians brand Yaroslavsky’s move to kill the Eastside subway as “mean-spirited,” an effort to stop all subway construction once the Red Line to his district is finished.

Yaroslavsky says he is simply doing what he thinks is right and is committing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his own campaign funds to see the measure enacted.

He dismisses the criticism that he is trying to deny a $1.1-billion, three-mile rail line to the Latino Eastside. “It’s not a racial issue,” he said. “Proposition A is about liberating the MTA to be able to provide mass rapid transit to a much broader segment of the L.A. population, including the Eastside, than would be remotely possible if we stuck to the subway strategy.”

To Yaroslavsky, the MTA has been the most mismanaged public agency in California. “The public is angry that so much money has been spent on a subway system that threatens to crush the MTA under the weight of its own financial mismanagement, that politics rather than need seems to govern decision-making,” he said.

MTA Chief Executive Julian Burke bristles at such criticism, saying the era of cost overruns, construction problems and management difficulties on the subway project is over.

“I’m not here to defend the subway construction, its construction costs or cost overruns,” Burke said. “If it costs $5 billion, it could have cost considerably less with better luck and a more attentive management process.”

The corporate turnaround specialist, personally recruited by Riordan in August 1997 to become the MTA’s fourth CEO in as many years, understands why voters may want to vent electoral frustration on the MTA. “I do understand where all that comes from, the reputation and lack of credibility of this agency,” he said.

But Burke said the MTA has changed.

Soon after taking the job, he recognized that the agency could not afford to pursue subway extensions to the Eastside and Mid-City, build a light rail line to Pasadena and also complete the Red Line to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

At Burke’s suggestion, the MTA board voted in January to halt the subway extensions and the Pasadena project. Under pressure from Washington, the board also adopted a recovery plan that would delay the rail projects until 2004 at the earliest.

Since then, Gov. Pete Wilson has signed a bill to create a separate transit agency to design and build the Pasadena project.

Allan Lipsky, the MTA’s deputy chief executive, said the ban on using sales tax revenues to build new subways is not meaningful. “We don’t have enough money to build more subways now,” he said. “It’s an option that is not on the table right now.”

Faced with the MTA’s failure to comply with a federal court order to reduce overcrowding on--and improve--the nation’s second-largest bus system, Burke said upgrading the bus service used by more than 91% of the MTA’s riders is his top priority. “This agency is on a track that it should be on,” he said.

But Yaroslavsky said the deeply entrenched pro-subway forces at the MTA will not give up their dreams of an ever-expanding subway system until voters rule it out.

Burke said he is concerned that Yaroslavsky’s initiative will mislead the public about the subway’s value. “Forget about the cost and difficulty getting it done,” Burke said.

He expressed confidence that the rail line “will be a meaningful element of transportation in this city” once the Hollywood line opens next spring and the remainder of the Red Line to North Hollywood opens a year later.

By that point, he said, the subway should record 125,000 boardings on an average weekday, nearly four times the current ridership, but still just a fraction of the bus system’s 1.1 million boardings. (A boarding is a passenger boarding a bus or train once. A round trip is two boardings.)

The MTA chief said he believes that county residents will have a different impression of the subway once the Hollywood and North Hollywood segments open. Unfortunately, Burke said, “they are not likely to have that impression before they vote on this matter.”

Meanwhile, the anti-subway initiative has divided old allies and created some unusual political alliances.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) is a staunch critic of the MTA and its subway, in particular. Determined to halt rampant special-interest influence at the agency, he wrote a state law to severely restrict campaign contributions to MTA board members from contractors, lobbyists, companies and individuals doing business with the transit agency.

Hayden supports Yaroslavsky’s measure, saying its passage is essential to end the MTA’s addiction to subways. “There is no solution to the L.A. transportation crisis until it’s gone,” he said. “The alternatives can’t be considered until the subway option is dead.”

Hayden, in fact, opposed construction of what he calls “Zev’s subway” from Hollywood under the Santa Monica Mountains to North Hollywood.

By contrast, one of Hayden’s traditional allies, the Sierra Club, is opposing Yaroslavsky’s measure. “To propose that, in effect, there shall be no more subway . . . in Los Angeles County in perpetuity is an overreaction to the finance and management problems in building the Red Line subway, many of which are problems experienced in the construction of other major public works projects,” a statement by the group said.

Instead, the environmental lobby argues that rail transit systems, including subways, are still essential to the transportation needs of Los Angeles because they provide an alternative to notoriously congested freeways and major streets and that they reduce air pollution, energy consumption and urban sprawl.

Hayden said the Sierra Club has been wrong on the issue for years. “They are completely unaware or indifferent to the cost per mile and insensitive to the fact that we have a federal civil rights violation [involving the decay of the bus system] that should be the shame of the city.”

Hayden’s position puts him on the same side as Supervisor and MTA board member Mike Antonovich, a conservative Republican, and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., which brought the state Proposition 13.

“The subway has been a boondoggle,” said Joel Fox, president of the taxpayers group. “It is a mind-boggling subway system that just robs from the taxpayers, who end up with nothing on the other end but a hole in the ground.”

Nonetheless, he readily acknowledged that Los Angeles has its transportation woes. He said Yaroslavsky’s initiative will allow voters “to express our anger in some kind of positive way” by encouraging the MTA to pursue cheaper transit alternatives.

Yaroslavsky said it is time for Los Angeles to declare victory and move on. “We’ve done the hard part. We put the subway where we absolutely had to put it in downtown L.A. and Hollywood,” Yaroslavsky said. And when the subway is finished, “we will have connected the Valley to the city.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

End of the Line for Subway Construction?

Proposition A on the November ballot would:

* Ban the use of Los Angeles County’s penny-on-the-dollar transit sales tax for any more subway construction. Passage of the measure would prohibit construction of the Eastside and Mid-City extensions of the Metro Rail Red Line.

* Prohibit the use of any transit sales tax revenues for planning, designing, constructing, financing or operating any new subway lines.

* Create an appointed five-member Citizens Oversight Committee to monitor the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s spending of the sales tax. There would be no elected officials on the panel.

* Require an annual independent audit of the MTA’s spending to ensure that it complies with voter-approved restrictions on the transit sales tax.

* Allow a share of sales tax receipts now set aside for highway-related transit improvements to be spent for mass transit projects in railroad rights-of-way.

Supporters: Initiative placed on the ballot by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, endorsed by Supervisor Mike Antonovich, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

Opponents: Latino and African American officials, including Supervisors Gloria Molina, Yvonne Brathwaite-Burke, the Bus Riders Union, Sierra Club, construction trade unions and Eastside activists.