MTA Sector Bus Plan Lacks Key Details as Roll-Out Nears

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is just weeks away from embarking on a dramatic internal shift: a move to push control of the agency’s bus fleet from its towering downtown headquarters into five regions spread through most of Los Angeles County.

Leaders at the MTA tout the move as a way to cut costs, improve service and become more responsive. They say the nation’s second-biggest transit agency will be able, for example, to creatively change routes in a bus system that looks much the same as it did in the 1960s, despite massive changes in demographics and new cultural and job centers.

But there is a good chance that when the new bus system rolls out July 1--initially in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys and a few months later in other areas--such important details as budget formulas, performance goals, boundaries and how the newfound bus regions will be governed won’t be set.

That’s a fact that is fraying nerves among groups involved with the plan.

The transit agency’s labor unions and the grass-roots advocates whose lawsuit forced the agency into a federal consent decree to improve the bus fleet are seeking answers, worried the plan could harm their interests.

Los Angeles officials are nervous that the plan will take power away from the city. San Fernando Valley leaders say if they don’t end up with real local control, they’ll resume proceedings to establish their own bus system.

And some on the 13-member board that controls the MTA and its $2.6-billion budget are unsettled. The board recently began meeting to take a hard look at the plan, and though overwhelmingly supportive, some worry that they don’t have nearly enough facts and figures.

“They are moving on certain aspects of the plan piecemeal, and that’s bothersome,” board member Paul Hudson said. “For instance, how much real local control are we as a larger board going to give to the boards governing the sectors? That is an issue that, unfortunately, seems to have been put off.”

The broad outlines of the plan are known. Bus service and planning for most MTA routes will be controlled by business units in five geographic “sectors”: the San Fernando Valley (from Glendale to Westlake Village), the San Gabriel Valley, the Long Beach area, the Torrance area and a swath from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica.

MTA headquarters, which is rapidly streamlining and has cut 46 positions since December, will oversee the rail system and operation of the long distance buses that crisscross the city, though MTA chief Roger Snoble, who came to the agency seven months ago vowing change, is still tinkering with the idea of ceding part of the regional service to the local bodies.

Each sector will be given a set budget and a fleet of about 500 buses and told to be innovative, producing better service and lower costs, or face firings.

On the hot seat will be the sector general managers, all five of whom have been hired, most lured from smaller bus companies for salaries that reach as high as $168,000. They’re each likely to manage a budget of at least $100 million, although a formula for figuring out how much money they receive beyond this year is one of the unsettled issues causing concern.

MTA officials envision managers better able to figure out where money is being wasted, and better able to motivate a work force they will know intimately. That will produce cleaner buses that break down less and run on time, a boon to an elaborate system that has 1.2million boardings each weekday, they say.

And planners, most of whom will relocate from headquarters to the sectors, will be able to better understand their areas. That should create service that interfaces better with the region’s many smaller bus systems, has improved routes to new job and entertainment centers, and drops riders at rail stops just in time for waiting trains.

“Sitting in this tower,” said Snoble, gazing out the window of his 25th-floor office, “we’re just too far away.”

Far from seeing the final details of the plan is the MTA board, which after setting the size of the local boards at roughly nine, decided recently that it would be willing to cede a great deal of control to the sectors.

Yet exactly what that means--whether the local boards will have much power beyond mapping out new bus routes, for instance--is unclear, say some on the board who want to delegate as much power as possible.

“That hasn’t been figured out yet. We haven’t really gone through it,” board member Allison Yoh said. “That’s one reason I’d like to see this slow down a bit.”

Snoble admitted that agency staffers are working on several important fronts, including the sector budgets and performance measures, which the agency chief wants overhauled.

Transit officials and advocates in the San Fernando Valley eagerly await resolution of the issues. There, Zev Yaroslavsky, county supervisor and MTA board member, has put himself in the seemingly conflicting position of leading a group that has been studying the creation of a “zone,” essentially a transit agency completely separate from the MTA.

Yaroslavsky, who says he is backing the sector plan for now, wants the makeup of the sector board to essentially mirror the panel studying the proposed zone. Yaroslavsky’s board is made up of representatives from Valley-area cities, mostly business and political leaders.

City Hall, however, is casting a wary eye at Yaroslavsky’s push. Mayor James K. Hahn wants to ensure that Los Angeles has the most voting clout and representation, because it represents the bulk of the riders in the proposed Valley sector.

And the mayor is advocating that at least one seat on the board be reserved for a citizen who relies on buses. That’s an idea eagerly embraced by transit advocates in the Valley such as Bart Reed, who heads a nonprofit focusing on improving the MTA.

“Keeping bus riders off the board means real power is not going to the people who use the system,” he said. “I don’t think that was the intent.”