Big Bucks for MTA Extravagance, a Pittance for Workers

There’s a breathtaking mural on the third level of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s sumptuous headquarters. The MTA paid $50,000 for it, which is about what Lorraine Mayfield, a bus driver, makes in a year. She works “five days a week, 12 hours and 51 minutes per day” to earn that paycheck, which is her family’s sole household income. It doesn’t go far.

Her home is a one-bedroom apartment over by the Coliseum. She is the single mother of two sons, one of whom is sleeping in the living room while he finishes school. Still, it has bought her a ’98 Windstar and an ’88 Montero, raised her boys--given her, in short, middle-class standing. Until Lorraine Mayfield became a bus driver, she was on welfare.

She confessed this last week, easing the No. 30 down 1st Street, the last leg of a 2 1/2-hour run that shuttles from the Santa Monica city limits to Boyle Heights. This, of course, was before the bus strike. On that day, the 450,000 people who are extremely immobile today were just extremely worried. Four seats back, Tien Nguyen wasn’t sure how he’d get to school. “Maybe some relative,” the 25-year-old sighed, “I have no car.”

Nguyen said he’d quit his minimum wage job to go back to East L.A. College to study computers. “You can make a lot of money in computers,” he offered excitedly. “Enough to buy a house, buy a car that runs. Even invest in the stock market. Someone told me up to $50,000 a year.”

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Funny how one person’s chump change is another one’s fortune. The MTA’s budget is $2.5 billion a year. If negotiators are to be believed, this strike happened over $2 million worth of the sort of annual overtime that pays for Lorraine Mayfield’s son’s college tuition. Two million dollars. Sounds like a lot, but in pocket-change terms, it’s two bucks out of that $2,500 you have in checking.

This is an outfit that has plunked down 50 grand for one office decoration in a headquarters that cost nearly a half-billion dollars. This is an outfit that, five years ago, gave itself a 26-story glass-domed office outfitted with English brick and Italian granite. Also waterfalls and giant aquariums and hand-made, architecturally integrated Latin-themed grills for the facade. Hard to imagine they couldn’t scrounge up a couple million from petty cash.

But this is also an outfit with a mission. The MTA wants to weaken these pesky unions. Due to the high cost of being the MTA--$50,000 murals and $300 million-a-mile subways and what have you--it now finds it can’t afford to pay its employees. Basically, there’s a massive transit system out there, and the MTA can’t afford to run it. Nor can it afford, politically, to gouge the riders. The MTA is run by politicians, and politicians are run by the public and the public doesn’t like to see poor people getting gouged in fat times. Gouging middle-class people--even middle-class people who are only middle-class by virtue of overtime--that, the public might go for.

So the MTA looks to its help, and whose help doesn’t start to look like malingering, overpaid scammers when the bottom line starts screaming?

God forbid, of course, that anyone look to the MTA.

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The MTA has become adept, over the years, at dodging responsibility for its choices. There are numerous reasons for this. One is that its board consists of people who are elected in various municipalities to do jobs other than transit. They’re mayors and county supervisors and appointees of mayors and county supervisors, and most voters don’t even know who’s responsible for the buses and trains.

Also, most voters don’t use public transportation in Southern California. Voting is a function of income, and people with income drive cars. If this were Boston or New York, where the middle classes take public transit, a strike like this would bring down wrath of apocalyptic proportions. But in just about every way imaginable, this is not Boston or New York. This is Southern California, where the buses run in a parallel universe filled with voiceless immigrants and feeble old people and poor people for whom the hardships, now, all just run together. The Los Angeles transit system has had seven strikes in 28 years. The voting public just tsks and drives by.

The MTA won’t have much incentive to cut short this latest hardship. Next to fares, its biggest source of income is sales tax and state money, and in these times, that dough just keeps rolling on in. Hard to imagine that the state--which is to say, the public--couldn’t see how it might share some blame here, and come up with a couple mil for the poor and the barely middle-class people the MTA has, again, pitted against each other.

But then, God forbid the public look to itself.

Shawn Hubler fills in today for the vacationing Al Martinez. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.