Riordan Ready to Leave MTA Driver’s Seat

For the past two turbulent years as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has tried to steer the county’s transit agency out of its literal hole and into the light of day.

As his tenure as chairman of the MTA board comes to a close this week, Riordan can look back on the selection of Julian Burke as chief executive officer as his most important accomplishment.

A longtime mayoral friend, Burke--along with his management team--has brought stability to the massive agency’s chaotic finances.

“If I did nothing else for the MTA,” Riordan said, “I should be deified for bringing Julian Burke.”

Together, Riordan and Burke have won respect from federal transit officials, who formerly were sharply critical of the MTA’s penchant for promising too much and pursuing overly ambitious plans to build more subway and light rail lines.

Under Riordan and Burke’s leadership, the MTA board last year bowed to fiscal reality and declared a halt to subway extensions to the Eastside, Mid-City and west San Fernando Valley, as well as a hiatus for a light-rail line to Pasadena.

But determined to finish what had been started, Riordan and Burke have been lobbying Congress to keep federal funds flowing to complete the Metro Rail subway to North Hollywood.

Throughout it all, Riordan has shown himself to be an adroit politician, basking in the glow of the recent opening of the subway to Hollywood while still quietly criticizing the decision decades ago to pursue the extremely costly underground rail system. At one point last year, Riordan went so far as to describe a continued pursuit of more subway lines as “insanity.”

“I wish we had never started the whole thing,” he said. “Fixed rail is not the answer to the transportation needs of our city.”

Riordan turns over the MTA’s chairmanship to county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who gives him credit for helping turn the agency around.

“He has seen the MTA through the tough times,” she said. “He came in when the economy was still pretty bad. . . . There were an awful lot of questionable deals. . . . Mistakes were made in construction, and there were cost overruns.”

She said the mayor has used “his business knowledge to push the MTA into a business mode and stabilize the finances.” And she said Riordan has established a good rapport with officials in Washington and Sacramento, both major sources of transportation funding.

Reviews Mixed on Bus System

But the mayor’s reviews are somewhat mixed when it comes to the bus system--the backbone of mass transit in Los Angeles.

On the MTA board, Riordan has been one of the few outspoken advocates for better bus service. He was a key negotiator of a landmark 1996 consent decree that avoided a trial in a federal civil rights case brought by bus rider advocates. The agreement requires the MTA to take steps to reduce overcrowding and improve and expand bus service, which is used predominantly by the poor and minorities.

The mayor led a delegation to Brazil to view the acclaimed Curitiba rapid bus system and to try to adapt the approach to sprawling Los Angeles.

For a while as chairman, Riordan even won guarded praise from the Bus Riders Union. Now all that is gone, replaced by anger at the mayor’s behind-the-scenes role in the agency’s decision to challenge the consent decree in federal court.

“He has gone from a disappointment to a deception to destroying an agreement that he reached,” said Bus Riders Union leader Eric Mann. “What the mayor is doing is trying to get out of an agreement that is having a payoff for bus riders.”

Riordan dismisses such criticism. He said the recent order by court-appointed Special Master Donald T. Bliss telling the MTA to buy an additional 481 new buses--above and beyond the 2,095 new buses the agency plans to purchase during the next five years--is excessive and unreasonable.

And the mayor now views the agreement he helped craft as a mistake. “Consent decrees are not invented on Mt. Sinai, and there are things in that consent decree that don’t make sense in hindsight,” he said. “I am deadly against government by consent decree.”

Riordan, in fact, said the MTA staff misled him as to the cost and practicality of complying with the decree. “The fact is, we didn’t know where we were at or where we were going three years ago, when we signed it,” he said.

He has encouraged the MTA’s newly aggressive legal challenge to the decree, saying the money needed to buy and operate the extra buses to reduce overcrowding--more than $400 million--could be better used in other ways, such as for rerouting buses or establishing a system of rapid buses and shuttles in local areas.

Resisted Purchase of Clean-Fuel Buses

Riordan also has been one of the voices resisting the idea of buying natural gas-powered buses, which are more expensive than new diesel vehicles. Ultimately, however, the MTA board chose not to abandon the agency’s policy of purchasing new clean-fuel buses.

During an interview in his office at City Hall East, Riordan said the problem with the Bus Riders Union is that “they are too rigid. They are not willing to step back and say what is in the best interest of the transit-dependent.”

For his part, the union’s Mann is indignant about the attack on the consent decree. “In retrospect, the mayor bought three years for rail. He used a signed consent decree to continue to pump money to [the] North Hollywood [subway extension] and gave a big wink” to the newly created Pasadena rail authority, “raiding $350 million of our money.”

Riordan said he favors construction of the light rail line from Union Station to Pasadena but objects to state lawmakers dictating the priority that the line be built. Nevertheless, Riordan said the politics were such that the MTA was not going to stop the creation of the Pasadena authority charged with building the rail line. The MTA will operate the trains once the project is completed.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member, said Riordan’s legacy thus far is having brought an end to the agency’s free fall.

“We have stabilized the financial picture, but we have not articulated a vision for the next 20 years,” Yaroslavsky said. “Where’s our vision? There is no vision right now. That is not Dick Riordan’s fault. It is a collective fault.”

But he said the mayor, who remains the most powerful member of the board, controlling four of its 13 votes, retains a special responsibility to lead.

“When the mayor wants to make changes, he pulls out all the stops,” Yaroslavsky said, noting Riordan’s successful campaigns to reform the City Charter and to remake the school board. “He hasn’t had a similar kind of campaign at the MTA, where he has control.”

Looking at Goals for Next 2 Years

Yaroslavsky expressed the hope that Riordan, in the last two years of his mayoral administration, will use his considerable muscle to promote reform and “get the MTA on a course for the future.”

Now that the MTA is “on its feet,” Riordan agreed, “it’s got to decide where it’s going to go.” He insisted that “a very sophisticated, very flexible bus system” is needed in mass transit, starting with a network of rapid buses that make only limited stops on specific routes.

Despite the factions on the MTA board that continue to promote rail projects, Riordan said he does not think any more subway lines will be built in his lifetime. However, he was a critic of Yaroslavsky’s ballot measure, passed by county voters last fall, that outlaws use of the transit sales tax for construction of new subways.

Riordan said the MTA must continue to have strong management that is willing to say, “No, you cannot afford expensive new projects.”

“It’s going to take constant discipline to stay in that direction, because you are going to have people coming in with all these different schemes on how to spend money here, there and everywhere,” Riordan said. “You could easily go off direction.”

One of the goals Riordan set for himself two years ago has been dropped. He spoke then of the need to work with state lawmakers to remake the MTA, reducing the size of its board and replacing elected officials with appointees. But he said the proposal found no political support, and with Julian Burke at the helm and the MTA board acting more cohesively, he no longer sees an urgent need for such reform. “It’s not high on my radar screen,” Riordan said. “If they get to warring too much, I might go back.”

Riordan’s patience is often tested during the long and arduous MTA meetings. He is quick to limit the amount of time for the public to speak and has shown his ire at the Bus Riders Union on more than one occasion. And at his direction, the MTA has restricted news media access to the hallway and back rooms where board members often congregate out of public view.

When he has other engagements and time is of the essence, Riordan will race through an agenda, calling for a quick vote and announcing seconds later: “OK, passed.”

He draws mixed reviews from leaders of the MTA’s two major labor unions.

Union Chief Cites Morale Problems

Neil Silver, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents 2,000 MTA maintenance workers and mechanics, said the high point of Riordan’s tenure was the choice of Burke as chief executive. But he said the morale of MTA workers is terribly low. And he complained that the board is spending too much time ordering studies on contracting out work rather than “fixing what’s wrong with the MTA.”

By contrast, the mayor wins high marks from the United Transportation Union, which represents bus drivers.

Yet there remains considerable concern in union quarters about proposals to create separate transit zones that would take over many MTA bus lines in the San Fernando Valley and western San Gabriel Valley.

After two years in the hot seat, there is little doubt that Riordan will enjoy being the MTA’s most powerful board member without having to chair its often chaotic meetings. Indeed, in a candid moment, he relished a respite from the agency’s problems.

“A day away from the MTA is like a month in the country,” he said.