Personal Toll Mounts as MTA Talks Continue

Negotiations continued Wednesday between the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and representatives of striking bus drivers, while the walkout’s toll mounted for merchants, bus riders and drivers.

The talks continued on Day 5 of the transit strike without the man many consider the most powerful member of the MTA’s governing board, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who City Hall sources said is on a bicycle tour in France.

With city streets virtually devoid of the nearly 2,000 buses the MTA operates on a normal weekday, and light rail and the subway also idle, many of the agency’s 450,000 passengers once again walked, rode bikes or scrambled for rides as best they could.

The most noticeable evidence of the strike’s spreading impact may have been an eerie “ghost town” quiet that descended on some of the city’s best-known landmarks in neighborhoods where many have no alternative to public transit.

The intersection of 103rd Street and Grandee Avenue in Watts, usually bustling with the constant movement of MTA buses and Blue Line light rail trains, was nearly empty at 8:30 a.m.

Only an occasional DASH bus--operated by the city of Los Angeles--rumbled by.

On the opposite side of the historic Watts rail station, the Food4Less store in a shopping center--a symbol of economic renewal on a street known as “Charcoal Alley” during the 1965 Watts riots--reported “a slight drop in sales,” attributed to the strike.

Miles away, at Grand Central Market on Broadway downtown, food stands usually packed during the lunch hour were practically begging for customers.

At Roast to Go, famous for its carnitas and other Mexican specialties, owner Rafael Penilla Jr., whose family opened the stand in 1952, said he had already laid off six workers and might have to let two more go.

Patrons usually line up three and four deep at his stand during the lunch hour for the fat tacos that Penilla sells for $1.50, but Wednesday there were few customers.

From dishing out 500 pounds of carnitas a day, he is down to selling 150 to 200 pounds of the succulent pork, he said. Business hasn’t been down this badly since the 1992 riots, he said.

“Yesterday, you could have rolled a bowling ball down the aisle and you wouldn’t have hit anyone,” Penilla said, pointing down a walkway, flanked on both sides by vendors’ stalls, that is usually shoulder to shoulder with people during lunch.

To the west, at one heavily traveled crossroads, news stand owner Carlos Campo kept waiting for customers who never came.

His stand, at Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue, is packed with magazines mostly in Spanish, touting Christina Aguilera and the latest Mexican telenovelas, as well as the National Enquirer.

Campo said early morning is usually his best time, as commuters using buses and the Red Line subway grab a magazine on the way to work. But Wednesday morning his stand was all but empty.

“Usually I sell about $250 worth a week,” he said, complaining that Tuesday he’d earned only about $10 because of the strike.

Frustrated Rider Is Left in Tears

At 7th and Figueroa streets, where she flagged down a special shuttle set up by the MTA to run passengers between Union Station and MacArthur Park, the frustration of dealing with the patchwork transit system had Sophia Arocha in tears.

The housekeeper said the strike cost her a $70 cleaning job in Carson. When she arrived at her client’s home two hours late Wednesday, he turned her away.

As a widow supporting three teenage children and her elderly parents, Arocha fears that her income will continue to slip the longer the strike lasts.

“No work, no money,” she said.

MTA drivers, meanwhile, continued to picket outside an MTA yard in downtown Los Angeles.

With the strike wearing on, many were thinking about what will happen after they receive their last paycheck Friday.

Although some strikers said they had savings enough to get them through a month or two of a walkout, others said their families live paycheck to paycheck and would scramble to pay bills.

But all were adamant about seeing the strike through, particularly because of the MTA’s insistence that drivers agree to changes that would mean an overall 15% reduction in overtime. Agency negotiators counter that they are offering pay raises equal to about 8% spread over three years.

“They are offering us a raise, but they are taking away our overtime,” said Debbie Flores, a 19-year MTA bus driver from Montebello. A single mother, she has three children, one of whom just started college, and is providing some financial support for her mother. “A lot of us live on our overtime.”

Flores is worried.

“I don’t have any money saved,” she said. What savings she had were wiped out getting her 19-year-old son, Joseph, started at Washington State University, she said.

She is unsure how long she can hold out. She has already talked to her landlord about how she will pay the rent after next month, she said. The union strike fund will pay strikers $600 a month, but the first checks are still weeks off. “But I am going to stick to my guns,” she said. “I am backing up my union.”

The workers and MTA management are split on numerous issues, ranging from the proposed cut in overtime pay to $23 million that the agency wants to save in the new labor contracts over the next three years. Facing an operating deficit of more than $400 million over the next 10 years, MTA officials say the current contract negotiations are a make-or-break budget proposition for the massive agency.

Drivers say the MTA wants them to bear the brunt of lavish spending on an ornate headquarters building, complete with Italian marble, and the costly subway.

The talks continued with two state mediators bringing the antagonists together and leading the negotiations. Both sides reported some progress.

Steve Smith, head of the California Department of Industrial Relations, a member of Gov. Gray Davis’ cabinet of top advisors, sat in on the talks at the Pasadena Hilton for the first time Wednesday.

Smith’s presence underscored the absence of Riordan, who controls four votes on the MTA’s board--more than any member.

Riordan’s last public statement on the strike was Monday and came via transcontinental news release. The mayor, then in Washington, D.C., called the strike intolerable and expressed sympathy for the thousands of Angelenos who had to walk miles to work amid a punishing heat wave. On Wednesday, according to sources familiar with his schedule, Riordan went to Europe and embarked on the French bicycle tour.

Press secretary Peter Hidalgo refused to confirm that the mayor was in Europe, saying only that Riordan was “off schedule” and that his whereabouts were private.

“When he is off schedule, we don’t disclose the mayor’s schedule. That is all we are willing to say at this time,” Hidalgo said.

He did say that “the mayor is fully accessible at all times,” just “a phone call away.”

Hidalgo said Riordan agreed with other directors of the 13-member MTA governing board to stay out of negotiations. The board is being consulted by MTA negotiators regularly through telephone conference calls.

The mayor’s absence was criticized by Miguel Contreras, chief of the county Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. “Mayor Riordan should step in and help push these talks forward,” he said.

With the MTA sticking to its game plan to use the proposed new labor contracts to save $23 million over three years, Contreras said the mayor needs to “bring some sense to the other side.”

Although reporting little in significant breakthroughs, James Williams, head of the drivers union, said Wednesday’s lengthy talks yielded enough progress for him to conclude “there might be a light at the end of the tunnel.”

But it was clear that much more work is needed to reach a new contract. “We’re still very far apart on the major issues,” said the MTA’s chief labor negotiator, Tom Webb. “We did deal with some of the minor issues.”

Williams said he is “very optimistic we might be able to resolve this over the next several days.”

However, Webb was not as hopeful, because the union did not commit to bargaining today. The next scheduled meeting is Friday morning.

The drivers union, along with other AFL-CIO unions, plan a major unity rally this morning outside MTA headquarters, raising the question of whether talks might begin again later in the day.

The MTA also is involved in contract negotiations with unions representing mechanics and clerical workers. But, with the drivers presenting the biggest problem, the other talks have been put on the back burner.

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Correspondents Gina Piccalo and Laura Wides contributed to this story.

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* COPING WITH MTA STRIKE

Civic cohesion has emerged in the MTA strike, although some price-gouging has surfaced. B1