MTA’s Choice: Buy Buses or Continue Fight

Five years after signing a federal court agreement to substantially boost bus service to reduce overcrowding, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board of directors will convene behind closed doors today, in a meeting that could have a dramatic effect on the scope and structure of mass transit service in Los Angeles for years to come.

The board must decide this week whether to continue its lengthy legal appeals or to abide by a federal judge’s order to buy 248 new buses to better serve its mostly poor, urban clientele. At stake is not only the quality of MTA bus service but, potentially, plans to expand carpool lanes, light-rail service, highway improvements and other programs.

If the MTA decides to follow the court order and buy the buses, service for tens of thousands of riders will be improved. Yet such spending will also greatly increase operating costs and threaten to draw money from other services.

And on a political front, some observers say the decision on whether to pursue more appeals is a significant leadership challenge for Mayor James K. Hahn.

In his first major vote as an MTA board member, Hahn saw his bid to quash a busway through the San Fernando Valley soundly defeated in July. Now the new mayor, an MTA board member who appoints three other members, will try to live up to a campaign pledge to abandon appeals and buy the buses.

“This is an extremely important test for him,” said Martin Wachs, director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies and an expert on Southern California’s mass transit systems. “He can’t dictate decisions of other board members, but this is a test of how he can build alliances. The question is: Can he get others to go along?”

Hahn will participate in Monday’s session over the phone, because he will be in Washington, D.C., on a lobbying mission.

“We feel even if the mayor is not there, he will do a very effective job in getting his point across and in managing to get others to follow,” said Manuel Criollo, an organizer at the Bus Riders Union. The grass-roots group’s lawsuit, alleging that the MTA discriminates against low-income bus riders, led to the 1996 legal settlement.

Bus Riders Union organizers have been lobbying board members with phone calls and letters to halt the appeals process. They expressed concern Friday that few board members were responding to their queries.

Riders Union organizers said that aside from Hahn’s backing, they felt their only firm commitments were from two Hahn appointees--Allison Yoh, a UCLA graduate student, and Broadway Federal Bank President Paul Hudson.

Yoh declined to comment; Hudson could not be reached.

One board member the union can’t count on is Chairman John Fasana. Though a number of board members declined to comment about their leanings, Fasana made himself clear. “I don’t think we have any choice but to appeal,” said Fasana, who said the federal judges have unnecessarily tied the agency’s hands with an order that threatens other MTA operations. “We have to have more control than this decree as interpreted gives us.”

Appeal Must Be Filed by Friday

MTA chief executive, Julian Burke, called Monday’s session to review the agency’s legal options, in part because another appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals must be made by Friday. The agency has several options if it chooses to press its case in court, including seeking relief from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Or the board could back off and fully commit to the decree, which the MTA entered into voluntarily.

“The board has a really difficult decision,” said MTA spokesman Marc Littman. “They can go forward with the judicial process, where they may or may not have success, or they can just go ahead and get the buses going.”

MTA officials raise a number of concerns about the effect of the bus purchase on the agency’s operations.

Littman said the MTA has enough buses available, but the agency does not know how it would pay for their use and continue its other operations. Littman said the agency may have to consider layoffs, cuts in freeway programs or reductions in rail service.

An MTA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said the authority may have to increase fares.

Money to complete construction of a light-rail line from Pasadena to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles should be safe, board Chairman Fasana said. But road projects such as proposed carpool lanes and other rail projects would be threatened. They include light-rail lines to East Los Angeles and an Exposition Park line running from downtown to Santa Monica.

Of even greater concern than new construction is continuing operations of rail and some bus lines, Fasana said. Even after the new rail line to Pasadena is finished, in July 2003, there may not be enough money to run the trains.

The Bus Riders Union and its lawyers doubted the MTA’s assertions Friday. “They’ve made that financial argument numerous times, and they haven’t presented evidence that supports their position,” said Erica Teasley, a lawyer from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“Our point continues to be that they made a promise to make bus service a priority, they haven’t kept that promise, they continue to drag their feet,” Teasley said.

The MTA signed the consent decree in 1996, promising to improve bus service and setting specific targets to dramatically decrease the number of people standing on overcrowded buses.

Indeed, over several years, the authority has made marked gains in improving the bus fleet, replacing about half of its roughly 2,000 aging buses. Most observers say the agency’s buses were sorely neglected in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, as the MTA spent billions on rail lines.

But the MTA and the attorneys representing bus riders have sparred in court over the interpretation and implementation of the decree.

MTA Wanted to Avoid Bus Buy

The board’s deliberations today follow the ruling on Sept. 1 by a three-member panel of appellate court judges, ordering the MTA to abide by U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr.’s requirement that the authority put 248 new buses into service.

The MTA had sought a reversal of Hatter’s order and argued that the consent decree, as interpreted by Hatter and a court-appointed special master, was far too intrusive in the agency’s affairs.

Even as the MTA haggles over the addition of 248 buses, bus advocates noted that court agreement will require the agency to do more. Under the agreement, the MTA will have to expand service to job sites, health centers and schools throughout the county.