MTA Seeks to Cut 230 Jobs, Blames Court Order

The MTA is seeking to eliminate at least 230 positions as part of a belt-tightening effort in its proposed $2.9-billion budget for 2004-05, Deputy Chief Executive John Catoe said Friday.

“We’re reducing our budget everywhere we can,” he said, adding that the proposed cuts were spurred in part by a consent decree requiring the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to provide additional bus service on crowded lines.

Earlier this year, court-appointed Special Master Donald T. Bliss ordered the agency to buy 145 additional buses and add 370,000 hours of bus service, which the MTA said would cost $400 million over the next decade.

“We’re faced with this consent decree, where we have to do this additional service, but there’s only so much money in the pot,” Catoe said. “With the artificial level of services you’ve got to provide, something’s got to go. In this case, it’s people.”

Bus Riders Union spokesman Manuel Criollo called it disingenuous to connect job cuts to the mandated service upgrades. The activist group fought for the consent degree.

“I think it’s business as usual” at the MTA, he said. “They’re not looking at the consent decree as an obligation. They’re looking at it as ... a way to lay blame on an obligation they have.”

Criollo said he believed that jobs could be saved by paring down the MTA’s construction budget. That budget includes a 14-mile busway from Warner Center in Woodland Hills to North Hollywood, now being built at a cost of $329.5 million, and a proposed six-mile extension of the light-rail Gold Line in the San Gabriel Valley whose projected cost is $899 million.

The proposed job cuts would save the MTA about $15 million, agency spokesman Ed Scannell said.

Reducing the construction budget is not feasible because large amounts of federal matching funds would be lost, $491 million in the case of the Gold Line extension alone, he said.

About 175 of the job cuts would come from layoffs, and the remainder from attrition.

Proposed MTA spending for 2004-05 is $89 million more than in this year’s budget.

Officials are scrutinizing expenditures in every department, even if they amount to only tens of thousands of dollars, to avoid cutting additional jobs, Scannell said.

“We are reducing the number of pool vehicles, the amount of travel, training. The cuts have been spread out agencywide,” he said.

The MTA will hold a hearing on the proposed budget at 10:30 a.m. May 20 at its headquarters, One Gateway Plaza, which is next to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.

The board of directors is expected to adopt a budget June 7 for the coming fiscal year.