MTA Executives Thrive While Riders Are Stuck

Re “Salaries Soar for MTA’s Execs,” Oct. 22: I was stunned to read that Chief Executive Roger Snoble of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority earns a yearly salary of nearly $300,000. I was further stunned to read that his perks include mortgage payments and car expenses. The number of executives earning more than $100,000 yearly has nearly doubled under his administration.

This is an outrage, in light of the MTA’s behavior toward its union employees during the strike. I think that the administrative officers of the MTA have got a colossal nerve to accuse the union of mismanagement while they are bleeding the company with salaries outrageously out of line with similar positions in similar cities across the U.S. It is certainly time for all of the facts to become public, and high time that government steps in to investigate these abuses.

John J. Palazzini

Woodland Hills

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I am not in favor of unions or management. I am in favor of fairness and equity. If some picketing union workers are rankled by the inequitable pay scales of MTA executives, what do you suppose the millions of bus riders who make minimum wages (or less) feel?

Your chart shows union workers paying from nothing to a mere $6 dollars in monthly health insurance costs. I’d be willing to bet the farm that there are millions of riders on those buses who can’t afford any health care whatsoever. Yet here you have union members earning $24 to $26 an hour and paying virtually nothing, while the burden of their health care is laid on the shoulders of those millions who can afford none at all. Hellooooo?!

Glen Hayden

Alhambra

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The strikes are a major calamity for disabled and retired people like me in the Greater Los Angeles area. I have no other viable means of transportation now, except via a couple of very close friends who happen to reside more than two kilometers south of where I live. Plus the fact that the Ralphs supermarket chain stocks the most of what I can consider kosher for my dietary needs.

I just wish that these several contending elements had been more cognizant of the fact that many of us are almost totally dependent on their being in functional operation daily; now we are stuck in a type of trap that we are almost totally unable to extricate ourselves from. The sooner these contending elements can resolve their points of difference, the better our chances of survival will be.

Carlos N.D. Klure

Los Angeles

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In regard to the MTA strike, Shakespeare has expressed most people’s sentiments perfectly: “A pox on both your houses.” Both sides are behaving like children, and the riders are suffering. I have to navigate through an hour and a half of bumper-to-bumper traffic each way, and I’m one of the lucky ones who have other means of commuting.

Joanne Kang

Cerritos

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We the taxpayers should stop subsidizing the MTA until it breaks the ongoing strike and establishes a mechanism to prevent any future strikes. It has been almost two weeks since the strike left half a million people stranded, while the MTA keeps receiving all its funding as if everything is running as usual.

The MTA should be forced to establish law and order on its own property -- El Monte Bus Station. It has been over a week since it has been picketed; the Foothill Transit buses are unable to access it and are forced to make long detours that worsen the traffic congestion even more. El Monte Bus Station is not a property of the labor unions; it’s the property of the MTA. Why doesn’t the MTA clear the station of the pickets and allow the Foothill Transit buses to access it?

Ruben Hakobyan

Glendale