MTA Ends Talks With Mechanics

Two weeks into a strike that has sidelined most Los Angeles County buses and trains, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials broke off labor negotiations Monday and declared an impasse.

“Virtually no progress has been made on any substantial issues,” said Roger Snoble, chief executive of the MTA, speaking of tense bargaining that included marathon sessions at the County Hall of Administration last week.

“We’ve been trying to hurry this up in every possible way that we know of, and it simply has not moved ahead. For these reasons,” Snoble said, the MTA board of directors “has instructed me to declare an impasse on our negotiations and to issue a last, best and final offer to” the mechanics union today.

The move stops the so-far fruitless negotiations over health benefits. The MTA currently pays for the union’s $17-million health fund. With that money, the union buys health insurance for its workers. The fund, now insolvent because of increases in health-care costs over the last two years, is the key sticking point in a strike that has left about 400,000 daily riders looking for alternative ways to get around the county.

Snoble said he hoped the union’s approximately 2,500 members would be allowed to vote on the final MTA offer, which the agency will mail and distribute at picket lines starting today.

He said the offer will not differ much from the MTA’s last proposal, which the agency says calls for a 5% wage increase over a nearly four-year contract, an immediate $4.7-million contribution to the union’s health fund and a monthly increase in the MTA’s contribution to the fund from $1.4 million to $1.9 million.

The union has said that is not enough to protect the fund from again being gutted by cost increases but has not publicly released its demands.

Neil Silver, the mechanics union president, said he was stunned by the declaration of impasse.

“I don’t understand what they are doing,” said Silver, who had made an offer to the MTA on pension issues Saturday night, the last time the two sides met, and was waiting for the state mediator to call them back to the table this week.

“They are playing charades with people’s lives,” Silver said. “My membership intends to stick this out because this is about their future, their health benefits today, tomorrow and forever.”

But if today’s offer is rejected, the agency could impose the contract and begin to restart its service, said MTA legal chief Steve Carnevale. By declaring an impasse and making the offer, the MTA also is laying the legal groundwork for hiring replacement workers, although Carnevale said the MTA hasn’t considered such a scenario.

“Whether the board ever gets to that point, I would not really want to speculate on it,” he said.

Hiring replacements would be difficult. Because most MTA mechanics are highly trained -- to work on explosive compressed natural gas engines, for instance -- replacements probably would have to spend months learning the job.

Snoble said that the two sides had “huge differences” and that he expected the strike would not end “for several weeks.”

He said the two sides were $37 million apart on health benefits and $98 million apart overall.

Silver questioned those figures, saying he had no idea how the transit agency came up with the cost difference. He would not say, however, how far apart the two sides are.