Today I am launching a drive to qualify a ballot initiative that will change and reform what has been the most mismanaged public agency in California: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the MTA. This initiative is aimed at redirecting public transit funds toward building a transportation system that is affordable, efficient and sensible. And, this measure is designed to establish a set of rules and regulations that will hold the MTA financially accountable to the County’s taxpayers.
My initiative, the MTA Reform and Accountability Act of 1998, will do several things:
First, it will prohibit the MTA from using the sales taxes it collects to build any new subways after the North Hollywood segment of the Red Line is completed. In other words, we will finish what we have under construction, declare victory and move on.
Second, it will, for the first time, require annual independent audits of the MTA’s sales tax expenditures.
Third, it will establish a citizens’ oversight committee to monitor the MTA’s spending.
Fourth, it will redirect the MTA’s mass transit spending towards technologies other than subways, such as light rail, busways and expanded bus service.
My aim is to give the people of Los Angeles County the historic opportunity to determine, for themselves, how scarce transit funds are to be spent. This initiative will give the public an alternative to the status quo---an alternative to the subway, which is one of the most expensive public works project in America today.
The alternative we offer is a more rational and affordable public transportation system for Southern California. The cost of the subway has ballooned to $300 million per mile, and federal financial participation has steadily declined. The difference has been made up from scarce local taxes which could have been used to build a greater number of affordable light rail lines and to expand and improve our bus system. To add insult to injury, much of the local transit taxes that could have been used for that purpose have been obligated for the next 20 to 30 years to pay off the debt that has been incurred to pay for previous subway construction.
In contrast, the cost of surface rail, such as the Pasadena Blue Line, is $62 million per mile. Simply put, we can build nearly five times as much light rail for the same amount of money we’re spending on the subway, thus reaching more communities and more sectors of this county; and doing it in our lifetime.
This initiative is more than a legal document or piece of legislation. It is about freeing the MTA to develop and implement a new vision for public mass transit for Los Angeles in the 21st century. The people of Los Angeles County inherently know that there is a need for some form of rail and grade-separated bus transit; that roads and freeway cannot adequately handle the current traffic, let alone future growth.
But, the public is also angry that so much money has been spent on a subway system that threatens to crush the MTA under the weight of its own financial mismanagement; that politics, rather than need, seems to govern decision-making; that we have a Green Line from Norwalk to El Segundo that doesn’t reach the airport; or a Red Line from downtown to the San Fernando Valley that doesn’t stop at the Hollywood Bowl.
The transportation planning system of this County needs to be changed and reformed, but in a way that preserves this community’s commitment to public transit---a commitment that has been generations in the making.
This measure is about turning the public’s legitimate anger and cynicism over the MTA’s past performance into something positive---into a public transit system that can reach more communities, less expensively and more quickly than is possible given the course we’re on.
In her book, the March of Folly, historian Barbara Tuchman described the kind of folly in which the MTA has been engaged in recent years: “It qualifies as folly,” Tuchman wrote, “when it is a perverse persistence in a policy demonstrably unworkable or counterproductive.”
The MTA has been engaged in a perverse policy that has not only threatened to bankrupt the agency, but which has compromised the very mission the voters gave it 18 years ago when they voted the first of two ½ cent sales taxes: to build an affordable and functional public transit system.
The time has come to change course. And, if there is to be change, it
will not come from the MTA; it can only come from the people, and the
people will have their chance to be heard in the months ahead.