Demos Succeed on MTA Workers’ Behalf : Legislation: Bill passes that would retain transit employees’ benefits in event of breakup of county agency.

SACRAMENTO —  Despite heated objections from Republicans, local officials and San Fernando Valley business leaders, Assembly Democrats pushed through legislation Thursday that protects bus workers in case regional transit districts are spun off from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Backed by powerful Democrats including Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) and Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), the bill would force new transit zones formed in areas served by the county’s MTA to inherit its labor union contracts.

It would also prevent future labor deals from being negotiated by a private company instead of a public entity, as is now done by Foothill Transit, a privately managed San Gabriel Valley area bus zone that is widely seen as a model of how to provide bus service that is better and cheaper than the much-maligned MTA.

“We all aspire to have efficient and effective government,” said Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles). “But in doing so, we should not disturb working families.”

The move to fragment the MTA is part of a much larger political movement in Los Angeles, rooted in secession efforts in the San Fernando Valley, to dismantle massive government agencies that many see as unresponsive bureaucratic dinosaurs in hopes of achieving more efficiency and local control for the sprawling areas they serve. The Los Angeles Unified School District and the city itself are the other chief targets of secessionists.

Local officials in nine San Fernando Valley area cities are proposing to break away from the MTA to run the 27 bus lines serving the Valley and surrounding communities. In the San Gabriel Valley, Foothill Transit hopes to expand into Pasadena and other cities.

Though they take no position on MTA breakup, labor unions are extremely wary of a repeat or expansion of Foothill Transit, which achieved its increased economic efficiency in large part by cutting workers’ salaries and benefits. They hope to ensure, through state law, that proposals to break off bus lines do not come at their expense.

“We want to take ourselves out of the debate over creating bus zones by eliminating the possibility that our workers could lose what they have been working for all their lives,” said Barry Broad, lobbyist for the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents 2,000 MTA workers.

Proponents of the transit zones, however, contend that the legal requirement that they take on the labor deals would make it all but impossible to achieve local control and independence from the MTA, and would, in essence, lead to the creation of inefficient “mini MTAs.”

“You’d now have the same folks who can’t deliver services re-creating the MTA in the Valley. This is a huge victory for the downtown bureaucracy,” said Richard Katz, the former Democratic assemblyman who is co-chair of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.’s transportation committee.

The bitter dispute has divided Democrats, who have sided with their traditional labor allies, and Republicans, who have sided with local elected officials and business leaders who favor MTA dissolution.

Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge) railed against the bill Thursday on the Assembly floor, describing it as a union ploy to preserve “bloated” and “corrupt” MTA union contracts at the expense of local control and improved service for Valley residents.

“It takes away the right of self-determination for the San Fernando Valley,” McClintock said. “The San Fernando Valley wants out of these contracts, so it can provide twice as many buses. But the unions won’t let it.”

Assemblyman Bob Margett (R-Arcadia) said the legislation was an attempt to preserve an existing bureaucracy, the MTA, even though Foothill Transit had shown a much more effective way to run bus lines.

“This is a bad bill, a union-grab bill,” he said.

Democrats, including several representing the Valley, strongly disagreed. Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), who had attempted to broker a compromise to the dispute by removing an MTA requirement that bus zones had to operate at a 15% lower cost, took strong offense to claims by business leaders that the legislation thwarted any new transit zones.

“I’m not into union-busting,” Hertzberg said. “These people are buying houses in the Valley, they are buying cars in the Valley from car dealers, and they are making $10 to $20 an hour. We can improve bus service in the Valley with this bill, without hurting them.”

The differences between Democrats and Republicans over the transit bill led to some high jinks in Sacramento in recent weeks.

McClintock led a successful Republican effort to stall the bill by refusing to grant a routine rule waiver needed to keep the bill moving through the Assembly due to the lateness of the legislative season.

That gambit forced Democrats to respond with one of their own: transferring all the bill’s contents to another, unrelated piece of legislation further along in the process.

Opponents said they have not given up hope of defeating the transit bill, and are mounting a last-minute bid to convince Gov. Gray Davis to veto it. They recently met with his staff and have written him numerous letters, said Irwin Rosenberg, regional vice president for Laidlaw Transit Services Inc., which would be likely to vie to provide bus service in the Valley.

A Davis spokesman said Thursday the governor has taken no official position on the transit zone bill.