Mayor Exercises Clout on MTA Board

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan reasserted himself with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Thursday, appointing an aide to a vacancy on the agency’s governing board and then slamming the door on rival directors, who wanted to grab a piece of the $30 million earmarked for traffic improvements tied to the controversial Playa Vista project near Marina del Rey.

Shortly before a key series of votes on the Playa Vista issue, Riordan filled the MTA board seat vacated by former City Councilman Richard Alatorre by naming his own transportation aide, Assistant Deputy Mayor Jaime De La Vega, to the empty seat.

Riordan, who ended a two-year term as MTA board chairman July 1, has kept a relatively low profile since being replaced by county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke in a normal rotation of the chairmanship. But in appointing De La Vega, he solidified his position as the board’s most powerful member.

De La Vega wasted no time in supporting his boss by voting with him to reaffirm the MTA’s commitment to spend $30 million on highway and road improvements in the Marina del Rey area.

By a 7-5 vote, the MTA reaffirmed its commitment to fund street widenings, freeway overpasses and other improvements designed to improve traffic flow along Lincoln Boulevard and the Marina Freeway.

Perhaps more important, the vote also removed the caveat placed on the $30 million that the street improvements were to be contingent on the movie company DreamWorks SKG locating in Playa Vista.

The money had been committed in 1995 as an inducement to persuade movie mogul Steven Spielberg and his partners in DreamWorks SKG to build a movie studio at Playa Vista in the Ballona Creek area just south of Marina del Rey.

When the movie company pulled out, the door was opened to other MTA board members who saw an opportunity to use the money to buy more buses or make rail improvements as part of the Alameda Corridor East project.

In a series of votes Thursday, Riordan first defeated an effort by county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to use the $30 million to buy buses.

The MTA is under court order to buy more buses, the result of a suit filed by the Bus Riders Union, and a large contingent of union members and activists showed up to make impassioned pleas against spending the $30 million on street and highway improvements.

The MTA is appealing the order, contending that it does not have enough money to operate the hundreds of new buses sought by the Bus Riders Union. The vote was interpreted as a sign that the MTA had a source of money to purchase buses, but chose not to.

“It’s just another piece of ammunition for us to take back to court,” said Martin Hernandez of the Bus Riders Union.

The union was joined at the hearing by the Sierra Club, the Coalition for Clean Air and the California Public Interest Research Group.

In addition to making a case for more buses, the parade of speakers complained that the $30 million would largely assist private developers of Playa Vista who otherwise would have to dig into their own pockets to mitigate traffic problems.

They also said the wider streets and overpasses would serve only to increase traffic and development in an area already heavily affected by both.

A large contingent of supporters of the highway expenditure also turned out.

Supporters, among them Marina del Rey business leaders, Culver City officials and Playa Vista supporters, argued that traffic is bad and getting worse in a grid from Los Angeles International Airport to Santa Monica and up to Culver City and West Los Angeles.

Riordan said studies show that even without Playa Vista, traffic in the Marina del Rey area will get worse by the day.

“Its a mess today, and those problems are only increasing,” he said.

Ultimately, 13,000 new homes and apartments are envisioned for the Playa Vista property, along with commercial development, and the development has been the source of a bitter fight between owners of the land and environmentalists and local citizens groups.

Rival board members offered up a compromise motion to use half of the $30 million now to mitigate traffic problems and wait until later to decide how to spend the remaining $15 million.

After that, Riordan, on a motion with county Supervisor Don Knabe, won a reaffirmation to spend the entire $30 million. On the losing side of the vote were county Supervisors Gloria Molina and Mike Antonovich.

De La Vega, 30, has been Riordan’s transportation advisor for nearly five years. The Woodland Hills resident said he and Riordan were very close in their philosophies on transportation.

In the past, when Riordan was absent, De La Vega filled in as his alternate on the board. He is married to Maribel Marin, an appointee of the mayor on the city Board of Public Works.

Meeting in closed session, the MTA board voted to pay $2.86 million to settle a lawsuit filed by contractor Tutor-Saliba-Perini over the firm’s work on subway stations along Vermont Avenue at Beverly Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard. The stations opened to the public in June.

The contractor, which has done more work on the subway project than any other construction firm, claimed that the MTA failed to pay for the removal of contaminated soil from the station sites.

MTA legal counsel Steve Carnevale said he anticipates that Tutor-Saliba-Perini will file more claims and possibly lawsuits over disputes arising from the subway project.

Times staff writer Jeffrey L. Rabin contributed to this story.