Salaries Soar for MTA’s Execs

Over the last two years, while the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has struggled to balance its books and hold down pay for its mechanics and drivers, executive salaries at the agency have soared.

Pay for top MTA officials, led by Chief Executive Roger Snoble at $295,000 a year, is higher than the salaries of their counterparts in comparable or larger transit agencies. These include systems in New York and Chicago that serve many times the number of riders, but pay their top executives less.

Executive pay has not been an issue in the strike by MTA mechanics, although the high salaries do rankle some picketing workers. The strike entered its eighth day Tuesday with no progress reported in negotiations. The Times obtained pay records from the agency last month.

According to the records, Snoble is paid nearly twice as much as the man he replaced in 2001. His deputy chief, John Catoe, makes $242,500 a year, about $80,000 more than his predecessor. A third official, Rick Thorpe, who oversaw the creation of the light rail Gold Line between Los Angeles and Pasadena while working for a separate construction agency, will make $236,000 a year as head of MTA construction, a new position.

Thorpe, who has not yet started, also has been offered generous perks. These include a $17,700 annual housing and car allowance and 52 round-trip airline tickets per year to Utah, where his family lives. The agency and Thorpe are still negotiating and say they may change the details, but not the overall value, of his compensation.

In the two years since Snoble took over as head of the agency, the number of MTA executives earning more than $100,000 a year has nearly doubled.

Source of Concern

The salary increases are a source of concern to some members of the MTA’s 13-member board of directors, even though they approved Snoble’s salary. At the time, board members said the highly regarded transit chief, brought in from Dallas, was well worth the money. Snoble has authority to set pay for the executives under him.

MTA officials defend the salaries. They say they are trying to run the transit agency more like a business, which means competing with large corporations for the best talent. Taxpayers benefit, they say, because the highly paid officials are doing a better job of running the agency.

“I know how it looks to the public,” Snoble said in an interview. “But it looks pretty bad to the public when you have sinkholes happening on Hollywood Boulevard, when you pay out over $50 million to attorneys for bad claims that have happened over a 10-year period.”

Mistakes such as those, which occurred under previous MTA administrations, “are frankly hundreds of times more costly than having a person who has got proven credentials in tough environments to be able to pull these things through,” he said.

With people such as Thorpe in the agency, Snoble said, “We will have the ability to do much higher quality of work and do it much more efficiently.” In a memo to the MTA’s board of directors, he predicted that Thorpe “will save Los Angeles taxpayers millions of dollars.”

The MTA salaries are generous by comparison with other cities.

New York’s transit authority reports 8.6 million boardings per weekday, about six times as many as the MTA in Los Angeles. The New York agency employs 46,000 people, more than four times as many as its L.A. counterpart.

Yet Lawrence Reuter, the head of New York City Transit, earns $225,000 a year, less than any of the MTA’s top three officials. The New York authority’s parent organization, also called the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has even lower executive salaries.

The head of the Chicago Transit Authority, which serves slightly more passengers than the MTA in Los Angeles, earns $197,750 a year.

According to the consumer price index, the cost of living in Chicago is slightly less than in Los Angeles, while New York is slightly more expensive.

Snoble’s salary is more in line with some of his counterparts in other, smaller California transit agencies, reflecting the high cost of living in the state. The head of the Bay Area Rapid Transit district earns $256,873 a year. The general manager of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority in San Jose earns about $207,640 a year.

San Diego’s Metropolitan Transportation Development Board paid its general manager, Tom Larwin, $162,750 a year. Larwin recently left the position, however, and interim manager Jack Limber said his replacement will undoubtedly be paid more.

Limber added that California transit agencies have a difficult time recruiting from other states without offering a generous compensation package, given the high cost of living here. He said he thought the MTA salaries sounded reasonable.

“Particularly in Los Angeles,” he said. “I think Los Angeles has had a very complicated transit system, and a very complicated history

Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, a watchdog group that keeps an eye on New York City’s transit agency, rejected the idea that high salaries are needed to attract good management to a transit agency.

“There are a lot of reasons why people go into public service, and usually compensation isn’t near the top of the list,” he said.

Told about the MTA salaries, he said, “It sounds like we’re pikers compared to L.A.”

Rank and File Notice

The executive pay hasn’t escaped the notice of the MTA’s rank and file, especially the bus and rail mechanics who went on strike last week in a fight over pay and medical benefits. The mechanics make about $30,000 to $54,000 a year, which is roughly in line with mechanics’ pay at other large transit agencies.

MTA mechanics pay no more than $6 a month for health coverage, but have offered to pay 10% of the health costs, or about $71 a month. Executives at the agency contribute 9% to the cost of their medical benefits. Benefits continue to be the main sticking point in talks between the two sides, which continued Tuesday at the county Hall of Administration.

The executives “have the diplomas and the paperwork on their walls, but to us, it is still not fair,” said Jose Barbosa, 49, a veteran mechanic who was picketing Monday in front of a downtown bus yard.

Barbosa echoed a sentiment heard frequently among strikers: “Basically, they are getting more and more money. And us? We are getting the scraps. We get the leftovers, and that’s hardly anything.... The money they are bringing in, it just doesn’t send us a good message. Basically, it makes them seem arrogant and like they don’t care.”

On picket lines, some mechanics have zeroed in on Snoble’s perks, which are worth more than the salaries of all but a few mechanics. Snoble receives $30,000 annually in retirement benefits, a $12,000 housing allowance and a $10,000 car allowance.

“The top guy is getting his mortgage subsidized and a company car and all of that,” said mechanic Harold Anderson, a 25-year veteran. “What are our highest expenses each month? The mortgage, the car, health care. We have a hard time enough paying for this stuff, man. And you see people in [Snoble’s] position getting those kinds of extras. It makes me think they just don’t care about my quality of life.”

Neil Silver, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1277, which represents the striking mechanics, said he watched with interest as top-level salaries at the MTA increased after the retirement of the agency’s former chief executive, Julian Burke.

“You’ve got to wonder what is going on over there since Burke left,” Silver said.

In September 2001, 59 administrators at the agency made more than $100,000 a year. The top salary, $162,387, went to Deputy Chief Executive Alan Lipsky, who left his job at the end of that year. Burke, who also left, was paid the second highest amount, $156,000.

As of last month, 108 MTA administrators were paid more than $100,000 a year, many of them well over that amount. Ten high-level MTA administrators now make more money than did Burke, a corporate turnaround specialist who was credited with stabilizing an agency that was on the brink of financial ruin before his four-year tenure as MTA chief.

Burke’s former chief of staff, Maria Guerra, now serves the same role for Snoble, and earns nearly as much as her old boss did.

Her salary is $155,074 a year, an increase of about $51,000 in two years.

Snoble urged critics to look at the bigger picture in considering the salary levels, noting that the MTA employs more than 10,000 people.

“The high-end salaries are not out of hand,” he said, “because you are still just talking about 1% or 1 1/3% and that is certainly not a huge number of our employees.... I think overall it is pretty reasonable.”

He noted that the agency had eliminated 104 positions in this year’s budget and will be cutting more jobs next year.

Although the MTA offers higher salaries than other agencies at the very top, New York has comparable figures for middle management. More than 500 employees of the New York Transit Authority earn more than $100,000 a year.

The MTA salaries worry Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, an MTA board member.

“We’ve got to start to pay attention to this,” she said. “You look at what they are paying people over there all of a sudden and say, ‘Wow, this is a public agency we are talking about.’ ”

Reacting to word of Thorpe’s salary package, MTA board Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky, also a county supervisor, plans to introduce a motion asking Snoble to draft new salary guidelines.

Los Angeles City Councilman Martin Ludlow, a new MTA board member, said he thought the salaries paid to top officials at the agency should be put into context. “The MTA is hiring people that are put in a really tough position -- changing the culture of a region that loves its cars,” he said. “It’s different than the East Coast. In some ways it’s a tougher job.”

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Comparing wages and benefits

Metropolitan Transportation Authority mechanics are on strike over wages and health benefits. Under their expired contract, top pay is $24 an hour for a bus mechanic and $26 an hour for a rail mechanic. Comparative wage and benefit figures for selected transit agencies:

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Metropolitan Transportation Authority (bus and rail)

Weekday boardings: 1.4 million

Top hourly pay for mechanics: $24 for bus; $26 for rail

Employees’ monthly share of health insurance costs: From 0 to $6

Top executive’s salary: $295,000

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New York City Transit (subway and bus)

Weekday boardings: 8.6 million

Top hourly pay for mechanics: $26.55

Employees’ monthly share of health insurance costs: 0

Top executive’s salary: $225,000

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Chicago Transit Authority (subway and bus)

Weekday boardings: 1.5 million

Top hourly pay for mechanics: $20.68 for bus; $23.78 for rail

Employees’ monthly share of health insurance costs: From $9.51 for least expensive individual plan to $134.40 for most expensive family plan

Top executive’s salary: $197,750

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Bay Area Rapid Transit (rail only)

Weekday boardings: 365,000

Top hourly pay for mechanics: $29.59

Employees’ monthly share of health insurance costs: $25

Top executive’s salary: $256,873

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AC Transit (buses in Alameda and Contra Costa counties)

Weekday boardings: 187,000

Top hourly pay for mechanics: $26.58

Employees’ monthly share of health insurance costs: 0

Top executive’s salary: $201,000

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Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (bus and light rail)

Weekday boardings: 187,000

Top hourly pay for mechanics: $31.60

Employees’ monthly share of health insurance costs: 0

Top executive’s salary: $207,642

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San Diego Transit

Weekday boardings: 134,000

Top hourly pay for mechanics: $22.59

Employees’ monthly share of health insurance costs: 0

Top executive’s salary: $162,750 (position vacant)

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Santa Monica Big Blue Bus

Weekday boardings: 60,000

Top hourly pay for mechanics: $27.45

Employees’ monthly share of health insurance costs: 0

Top executive’s salary: $151,176

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Sources: Transit agencies; Federal Transit Administration