Blue Line Woes Prompt MTA Shake-Up

The top manager of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Pasadena Blue Line project was replaced and his deputy was fired Friday in the wake of a scathing audit that found skyrocketing design and engineering costs.

Project manager David Sievers was reassigned to another job, deputy project manager Lynn Struthers was terminated and a new interim project manager was appointed in a major shake-up of those in charge of running the $800-million light-rail project.

“The changes made were necessary to improve the management on the Pasadena Blue Line project,” said Charles Stark, MTA’s acting construction chief. “We want to restore the confidence of the public at large and our funding agencies,” he said.

The sweeping personnel changes come as the MTA is struggling to produce a revised “recovery plan” for how to get its ambitious rail construction program back on track while also meeting a federal court order to improve bus service. The first plan was rejected by federal officials.

The latest changes follow another highly critical audit by the MTA inspector general that found design and engineering costs on the Pasadena project had soared from an original budget of $47 million to a projected $93.6 million.

With a further slowdown or cutback in subway and light-rail projects a certainty, the move is seen as a way to protect the Blue Line project connecting downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena. In the most recent draft plan, the 13.6-mile trolley line was a top priority for completion.

Stark said the shake-up was also designed to restore the confidence of the MTA board and the agency’s credibility.

Meanwhile, San Fernando Valley politicians and community leaders reacted angrily Friday to news that the area may face further delays in construction of an east-west rail line, despite having generated millions of tax dollars over the last two decades to pay for a transit system.

The MTA, faced with multiple financial and administrative problems, is weighing a proposal that could push back the start of construction for the Valley rail extension from the original 2004 date to 2007, and possibly as late as 2011.

“It’s outrageous that after all these years of paying sales tax, we are talking about further delays in an east-west subway line,” said U.S. Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City). “The notion that the Valley would not be the first priority after the completion of the Red Line [from downtown] to North Hollywood is totally unacceptable.”

Valley residents and officials have been debating for years what kind of rail line to build from the planned Red Line terminus in North Hollywood across the Valley to Woodland Hills.

At Mayor Richard Riordan’s urging, the MTA is studying whether an above-ground rail line or other alternatives could be built cheaper and faster than a mostly underground line across the Valley. MTA officials said the Valley extension is only one of many projects facing delays under a plan designed to allay federal concerns about the agency’s ability to pay for court-ordered bus improvements and long-promised rail lines.

Federal officials have told the MTA not to even think about seeking federal funding for distant rail projects, including the east-west rail line, until the agency completes work currently underway.

The MTA must win back the Clinton administration’s confidence in its management of the overall subway project, the West’s largest public works project, or risk losing a crucial ally in the fierce battle for federal funds from Congress. The federal government is paying for about half of the subway.

Besides the east-west Valley line, a second planned extension of the subway on Los Angeles’ Eastside also could run past its original start-up date.

“Everything is being delayed,” said Jim de la Loza, executive officer for the MTA’s Regional Planning Division. “The only project that remains on schedule is the North Hollywood [Red Line] extension. Everything else is being impacted.”

Transportation planners have been struggling to come up with a plan--an initial proposal was rejected by federal officials as financially unsound--that can win political support on the MTA’s fractious 13-member board and still satisfy federal concerns over whether the agency can afford to complete the transit projects it continues to promise.

Federal officials have asked the MTA to set aside a reserve fund to finance cost overruns and funding shortfalls for transit projects.

They also regard MTA’s estimates of sales tax revenues as overly optimistic and have told the agency to base its plans on a more conservative estimate of receiving $2.1 billion less between 1999 and 2013. Those more conservative fiscal forecasts have led MTA officials to anticipate the delays.

MTA officials stress that projects like the east-west Valley line could be built sooner if the local sales tax revenues come in closer to MTA’s higher sales tax projections.

Still, many Valley community leaders predicted that the MTA’s proposal will fuel a local secession movement that was spawned by contentions that the area does not get a fair share of services despite its large population and healthy tax base. Valley residents have paid more than $1 billion since county voters approved half-cent sales tax increases in 1980 and 1990 to fund local transit, said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

“This is giving us ammunition to go to elected officials and say, ‘This is what is happening to the Valley and this is why we have to have a city council and a mayor that answers only to the Valley,’ ” said Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn., the largest homeowners group in the area.

“We have been paying sales tax every day to get a transit system in the Valley but all we get are 20 years of studies while Pasadena, the Eastside and other areas are getting rapid transit systems constructed,” Close said.

Some local activists accused the MTA of deliberately seeking to direct funding away from the Valley line in favor of transit projects elsewhere.

“They are going to take the Valley’s money and put it wherever they please,” said Marvin Selter, chairman of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. “We believe in community empowerment and they obviously don’t.”

In the Pasadena Blue Line shake-up Friday, Sievers was reassigned to MTA’s systemwide engineering group. He could not be reached for comment.

Struthers, who was deputy project manager for engineering on the planned rail line, said he would appeal his firing through the Civil Service system. His last day on the job was Friday.

In a brief interview, Struthers said he felt he had been terminated unjustly, but declined to discuss the matter further because of legal considerations.

At an MTA construction committee meeting earlier this month, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina was incensed about the staff’s failure to satisfactorily answer questions about how the massive cost overruns could have occurred. Molina, the committee’s chairwoman, called the soaring costs a “total disgrace.”

Times staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this story.