Agencies Fight Over Use of Transit Tax Revenues : Finances: RTD wants to help fund existing service with money from voter-approved surcharge. But county commission says the money is meant for long-range projects.

Los Angeles’ new subway trains are on a collision course with its workhorse buses.

Facing a $117.4-million deficit this year--the second massive shortfall in as many years--the Southern California Rapid Transit District warns that it will have to raise bus fares and cut service unless it can tap into a new voter-approved half-cent sales tax surcharge.

But the RTD is meeting fierce resistance from elected officials because the rival Los Angeles County Transportation Commission has earmarked that money for such improvements as new train lines, expanded services for handicapped riders--and, ironically, more bus service on county streets.

The fight is nominally over a 40% share of a $360-million annual transportation-improvement fund--”discretionary” dollars to be used for the general improvement of transportation. The remainder of the transit tax is legally dedicated to such specific jobs as improving freeways and hiring more transit police.

The RTD contends that the best use of that money is for its existing bus services, squeezed by the recession and rising fuel and medical costs. A transportation commission committee narrowly sided with the transit district, but LACTC staff members recommended only $58.2 million in aid this year. To give more, the staff warned, could sacrifice an entire generation of transportation improvements.

At stake, both sides have argued, is the future of mass transit in Los Angeles County: Will the LACTC board support buses at any cost today, or stick to its plan and invest in additional trains for tomorrow?

The simmering battle, which is scheduled to be decided today by the transportation commission, also might shape the future of transit in more subtle ways. The commission’s decision could, for example, determine which agency retains the most power after they complete a state-mandated merger next summer.

In the meantime, the decision certainly will reach beyond the county borders, because the tax revenues sought by the RTD include funds to buy several hundred miles of Santa Fe railroad track. That track is needed to expand the proposed five-county Metrolink commuter rail network beyond the three lines scheduled to open Oct. 26.

Rapid Transit District planners contend that maintaining current bus service for the RTD’s 1.2-million daily riders must be the region’s top transit priority. But LACTC planners counter that expanding mass transit with rail lines to ease current congestion and accommodate future growth should take precedence.

“People voted those half-cent sales taxes (in 1980 and 1990) to solve congestion,” said LACTC Executive Director Neil Peterson. “If you use all of that just to maintain bus service where it was a decade ago, will you solve congestion? Hell, no.”

RTD officials respond that their passengers are mostly poor and without other transportation options, and say it would be wrong to cut service to build train lines geared toward more affluent riders.

“It’s easy to say that people didn’t vote for Proposition C to help the RTD,” said Rapid Transit District spokesman Jim Smart. “But the alternative is $1.50 base fare and an 11% cut in service. I guarantee you they didn’t vote for that.”

When voters were considering Proposition C, proponents promised that the new tax would help the county take new steps to corral congestion. These included commuter trains, light rail lines and high-tech highways using synchronized traffic signals and other electronic wonders. Proponents also promised to create a cost-efficient bus system.

Those promises are jeopardized by the RTD’s $117.4-million request, Peterson and others said, because it would prevent the commission from issuing $500 million in bonds later this year as planned. It also would cost billions in state and federal construction grants, which are based on the amount of matching local funds devoted to building new projects.

LACTC officials have said the resulting cash shortage would force them to delay or jettison many of the projects envisioned in their 30-year plan to improve countywide transportation.

Specifically, Peterson said, the third stage of the Red Line subway would be delayed for 12 years. This stage includes extensions from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley; Mid-Wilshire to Mid-City, and Union Station to East Los Angeles.

In addition, a proposed light rail line to Burbank and Glendale would be delayed at least 30 years, as would other rail lines along Exposition Boulevard, across the San Fernando Valley and through the southern San Gabriel Valley. A proposed Blue Line extension from Los Angeles to Pasadena would be canceled.

LACTC staff and board members have organized considerable political opposition against the RTD by broadcasting these dire predictions around the county.

“The magnitude of this problem cannot be overstated,” LACTC board member Jacki Bacharach of Rancho Palos Verdes wrote in one letter she faxed to officials of small cities.

But RTD officials and even some LACTC board members are skeptical of the doomsday scenario. LACTC board member Mas Fukai accused his staff of telling critics what to say and thus forcing the board’s hand. Another member, Judy Hathaway-Francis of La Habra Heights, sent her own letter to city officials, telling them to resist the staff’s “emotionally based appeal.”

“To suggest that the entire program of transportation projects in the 30-year plan will either be put on hold or eliminated by a $117-million request by any entity and solved instead by a $58.2-million grant does not merit credibility,” she wrote.

The problem is that when voters approved the two local sales tax surcharges--Proposition A in 1980 and Proposition C in 1990--county officials divvied up the revenue among rail, bus and highway improvement projects without anticipating a recession as deep and long as the one now plaguing Southern California.

At the same time, RTD bus ridership--and revenues--have dropped steadily each year since the mid-1980s, at first because of fare increases and then for less-obvious reasons. Crowding and graffiti on buses and cheap gasoline and parking for cars are most often blamed for declining bus ridership.

RTD also is coping with some of the same additional business costs faced by other Southern California companies, such as soaring workers’ compensation insurance rates and expensive new clean-fuel buses to comply with air pollution regulations.

The crunch appeared last November, when the LACTC announced that reduced sales-tax revenues would prevent it from providing all the subsidies promised to the RTD and other publicly owned bus operators, such as Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines, Long Beach Transit and Montebello Bus Lines.

Since the RTD carries 85% to 87% of the county’s bus riders, it was hit hardest by far. As the regional carrier, it could not fall back on other subsidies that city-owned bus lines have used.

That $65-million crisis was buried using a combination of cost cuts and additional subsidies. But, as was predicted earlier this spring, a larger shortfall has grown in its place.

The RTD is being painted by the LACTC and its allies as an inefficient, mismanaged bureaucracy that spends nearly twice as much per hour to run its buses as other local transit agencies.

The RTD counters that, as the primary local transit provider, it bears certain unique fixed costs, such as a transit police force and a telephone information service. It also argues that its buses operate mostly in congested areas that eat up drivers’ time and force up maintenance and insurance costs.

Rather than being measured by the average hourly cost of running one of its buses, the RTD says it should be judged by how much it spends per rider--an equally arcane yardstick, but one by which the RTD compares favorably with other, much smaller local providers.

BACKGROUND

Proposition C, establishing a half-cent sales-tax surcharge, was approved by voters in November, 1990, as a “fast-track, anti-gridlock transit improvement.” Now county officials are debating whether the tens of millions of dollars it raises should subsidize existing bus service or build more train lines, buy new buses and improve freeways. The ordinance says: “The purposes of this tax include . . . meeting operating expenses . . . necessary to maintain service within existing service areas.” The law permits fare subsidies, but talks mostly about ways to “improve and expand” public transit.