Mayor’s Choice to Run MTA Turns Down Job

Theodore Weigle Jr., Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s choice to take over the helm of the troubled Metropolitan Transportation Authority, turned down the job Tuesday, leaving the county’s transit agency without new leadership at a time of renewed crisis.

After weeks of negotiations, the Bechtel Corp. executive informed MTA board member and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky in a transatlantic phone call that he had decided to stay with the multinational construction firm. Weigle is overseeing construction of the Athens subway.

“He is not going to take the job,” a disappointed Yaroslavsky said. “It is a setback for us. There is no question about it.”

Weigle had been seen by most MTA board members as the best hope to take charge of a $3-billion-a-year agency racked by political bickering, plagued by persistent conflicts between competing subway and rail construction projects, and faced with a federal court order to improve the nation’s most overcrowded bus system.

His experience running transit systems in Chicago and Washington before joining Bechtel and overseeing the huge Central Artery project in Boston and the Athens project was considered vital to turning the MTA around.

Riordan, the most influential member of the MTA board, had pushed hard for Weigle’s selection in a three-hour, closed-door executive session last month.

“We have an agency that is out of control,” Riordan said recently. “We desperately need a new CEO as soon as possible to shake up the agency.”

The mayor, who becomes MTA board chairman July 1, expressed his disappointment over Weigle’s decision and said the selection of the new transit chief is one of the most important decisions facing him.

“I’m optimistic that we will find the right person. We already have some new names to look at,” he said.

Riordan and Yaroslavsky said Weigle made a personal decision because of concerns about the impact of the MTA job on his family.

The agency’s need to find a new chief executive officer to fill the leadership vacuum is so urgent that the MTA board was reportedly willing to pay Weigle one of the highest salaries in the transit industry--well over $200,000 a year plus benefits--to take the challenge.

The MTA runs one of the nation’s biggest bus systems, with 1.1 million daily boardings, and is building the West’s largest public works project--the $6.1-billion Los Angeles subway. The county’s next transit chief will face financial and political turmoil that demand Solomon-like decisions, all under the scrutiny of a 13-member governing board accused of constantly meddling in the agency’s day-to-day operations.

The new leader will step into a political minefield, ever so treacherous because of conflicting demands from board members pushing their political agendas, well-connected businesses and their lobbyists seeking lucrative contracts, a federal government pushing for completion of the subway, and a federal court order requiring costly improvements in the bus system.

In fact, Yaroslavsky recently declared that he is close to calling on the state to place the agency under receivership.

“We can’t run this agency the way it’s going now,” Yaroslavsky said earlier this month. “It’s too factionalized. It’s too corrupt. It’s too out of touch with public scrutiny. Strange things are happening and the public is not being well served. If we can’t clean up our act on our own, then we ought to give it up and let somebody who can run it, run it.”

Yaroslavsky said Tuesday that his thoughts haven’t changed.

“Business as usual has earned MTA an international reputation of incompetence, corruption and wasteful spending,” he said. “That’s got to change or the MTA will lose what’s left of its authority to plan and run transportation in Los Angeles.”

To make matters worse, Yaroslavsky has threatened to block the agency’s guaranteed access to the wallets of county residents by publicly musing on whether he should lead a drive to repeal the penny-on-the-dollar sales tax that is the MTA’s financial lifeblood.

“The time has come to ask the fundamental question, ‘Where is this agency going?’ ” he said. “Why should L.A. County taxpayers be asked to pay 1 cent on the dollar for this. The taxpayers have not gotten a fair shake out of this agency.”

The twin half-cent sales taxes approved by county voters raise about $840 million a year to finance bus operations and rail construction.

Among other problems facing the next chief executive:

* In Washington, the MTA must win back the Clinton administration’s confidence in the agency’s management of the subway project or risk losing a crucial ally in the fierce battle for federal funds from Congress. Washington is paying for about half of the project.

The MTA has asked Congress for $100 million this year for subway extensions to the Eastside and North Hollywood. If the agency ends up like last year, when it received less than half of the money it requested from Congress, it could be forced to delay the subway project even more, intensifying the MTA board’s internecine squabbling over dwindling transit funds.

The MTA also faces a tough time securing federal funds for a further subway extension to the Eastside and a proposed east-west rail line across the San Fernando Valley. Federal officials have pointedly told the MTA not to even think about those projects--which no one proposes opening for more than a decade--when it has not completed the work already underway.

* In Sacramento, no less than eight bills have been introduced to change the way the MTA is run. One bill would weaken the county supervisors’ influence over transportation decisions by reducing the number of supervisors on the MTA board from five to two. Another bill would abolish the MTA and create three separate transit agencies.

Riordan has advocated a board made up of non-elected appointees “to take the politics out of the MTA.” But critics have said a non-elected board would take the county back to the days of the MTA’s predecessors--the Southern California Rapid Transit District and the County Transportation Commission, whose boards of political appointees were criticized for insulating elected officials from controversial decisions.

* In Los Angeles, bus riders have accused the MTA of moving too slowly to comply with a court order to expand bus service, and their attorneys have vowed to ask the court-appointed “special master” to intervene unless the MTA board acts by May 28 to buy at least 152 more buses.

Labor contracts for drivers and mechanics expire June 30 and MTA has begun recruiting replacement drivers in case it is hit by another strike, like the nine-day walkout in 1994.

* The agency remains the subject of a criminal investigation by the MTA inspector general over the handling of a contract to supervise subway construction on the Eastside. The inspector general reported that at the end of last year, his office had 47 investigations underway.

* Subway construction is about to enter a critical juncture. Tunneling through the Santa Monica Mountains is going more slowly than expected, and the MTA plans to begin using explosives under the mountains this summer. Also, the agency is gearing up to begin digging early next year on the Eastside, under more homes and businesses than anywhere else along the subway route and through the trickiest soil conditions.

Whoever becomes the agency’s next chief executive will have to tread lightly to avoid the pitfalls that toppled the agency’s two previous leaders.

Joseph Drew resigned in December after less than a year on the job, saying that political infighting and “public hypercriticism” of him and his staff made the job an impossible task. The first transit chief, Franklin E. White, served 32 months before he was fired in 1995.