The Trains <i> Are </i> the Robbers : Buses: The MTA rewards bigwigs and punishes customers by raising bus fares to pay for rail.

The directors of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have stated their intention to vote today to spend $123 million to continue the boondoggle Pasadena Blue Line rail project, whose biggest supporters include Mayor Richard Riordan, L.A. City Council member Richard Alatorre and L.A. County Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Gloria Molina (all board members). Just last week the board voted to raise bus fares to $1.35 and eliminate working people’s bus passes. This action ensures a tougher life for poor and working people--the 1.3 million daily bus riders--and a windfall for the well-to-do, since Metro Rail subsidies are $9.86 a ride ($38 including capital costs) and rail-contractor cost overruns average 313%.

Riordan, for one, benefits from from his investments in the rail engineering firm Tetra Tech, Inc. and his cultivation of every Tutor and Saliba in town (contractor Tutor-Saliba gave Riordan’s 1993 campaign $5,000. Cleo Saliba gave $1,000, Naseeb Saliba $1,000, Albert Tutor $1,000 and Ronald Tutor, $1,000). Meanwhile, the MTA has rapidly degenerated: bad transit policy has turned into political scandal, prompting public outrage.

Last year, I wrote in these pages that the MTA was robbing the bus system to pay for ill-conceived rail projects. Riordan, Alatorre, Molina and County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke assured us they shared our concerns, then voted with board members Michael Antonovich and Deane Dana to spend $60 million for the Pasadena Blue Line with funds we knew they didn’t have. We testified, accurately but to no avail, that this would assure their return in 1994, claiming a funding shortage, to propose cuts in bus service and fare increases.

In the past few months of public hearings, several thousand poor, disabled, elderly and working people and high school students begged the MTA board not to raise bus fares. Riordan, Antonovich and friends joked among themselves and didn’t even pretend to listen, then voted to raise fares and eliminate monthly passes. Imagine a working woman who, along with 500,000 other Angelenos who labor for less than $10,000 a year, makes four bus trips each working day, (one round trip to work and another for child care, shopping or visiting a friend) and one round trip each weekend day. Even with Molina’s token plan to preserve the 90-cent bus token, the working woman’s monthly cost without a bus pass would increase from $42 to $90, a leap of more than 100%.

This will drive the poor who can afford it to buy an old gas-guzzling car (which they’ll probably have to drive uninsured) or walk or lose their jobs.

With the poor and working people out of the way, the MTA board can move on to what it does best, using its $3-billion annual budget--the only significant pot of money in fiscally depleted Los Angeles--to build monuments to themselves. Riordan, who controls the city’s four seats on the MTA board, is most responsible for this malfeasance, followed by Alatorre, Molina and Burke, who claim to represent districts whose residents will suffer most from this Great Train Robbery.

In an effort to mobilize the “masses” in the mass transit system, working peoples’ activists from the Labor/Community Strategy Center have been organizing on the buses for six months. They report that sentiment has rapidly moved from “How can we protect our fares and service?” to “How do we get rid of the entire MTA board?” Even as the MTA squanders public money buying ads slandering its union employees, and implements its “let them eat tokens” policy, it is helping us organize another union, the Bus Riders Union, modeled on New York’s highly effective Straphangers organization. This new union plans demonstrations and other direct action aimed at discrediting and removing specific MTA board members. Our aim is a moratorium on rail projects until the bus system is given top priority, based on the revolutionary idea that the MTA should spend public funds to serve the majority of transit riders, develop attractive alternatives to smog-producing autos and help a racially and class-polarized city reduce rather than exacerbate those antagonisms.