Near-Total Recall

Let’s say you drive a Hummer and would never step foot on a subway or a bus unless a judge made you as part of a sentence for crimes against the planet. You’ll still want to hear this wild yarn.

All but one member of the governing board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority should have been recalled on the spot last week, for 10 felony counts of not knowing how they were spending the public’s money.

Their offense: They didn’t know the full details about a sweet little project on which they voted to spend anywhere from $60 million to $80 million – or more. A head of lettuce would have acted more responsibly than the 10 members who supported the 10-year contract to install and maintain turnstiles at Red Line subway stations and a few light-rail

stations.

Even if you favor the turnstiles, a defensible position for a thoughtful person to hold, you would have been tempted to hide under a bus during last week’s reckless display of ignorance and parade of unanswered questions. But you would have had to move fast. You might have trouble finding a bus, because the board is looking to cut nearly two dozen routes to help fill a $100 million deficit.

The one board member who tried to bring reason to the debate from Day One, Richard Katz, lost the final round: “I continue to marvel at the push to do this. Whether the money can be used for the buses or somewhere else in the system, we have a system that is in financial trouble. There are other places in our system where this money could be put to better use. I would really like the board to take a hard look at this and reconsider. We’re just not at the point where the questions have been carefully examined.”

Referring to a report that raised questions about the project, “It’s all been been sort of swept under the carpet and I think that is wrong…The numbers don’t make sense.”

For the sake of debate, let’s assume Katz is full of it. Here’s the best argument in favor of turnstiles: Every year, fare evaders cost the system anywhere from $2 million to $5 million or more. High-tech security devices are so sophisticated that they can detect someone passing through a gate who has touched an explosive device in the past two days. And, along with the new ticketing system, it’s quite possible that Metro will know the names of 90 percent of its passengers. Any odd-acting strangers will stand out and immediately be tracked by a battery of cameras so advanced they can alert nearby deputies to a bag abandoned only 30 seconds ago. And stations will be flooded with deputies, with some of the $7 million now spent on civilian fare checkers to be used hiring real cops. Still not convinced? Then either you’re an Al Qaeda sympathizer, or for some reason believe subway travel should be more dangerous than flying on an airplane.

All that sounds good – except for one thing: the plan board members approved didn’t even include those sparse details.

As for the $7 million, they don’t know how much of that money will be saved.

That wasn’t acceptable to Gloria Molina.

Anticipating the staff report that will arrive as surely as the 7:10 a.m. leaves Union Station for North Hollywood every morning, Molina warned: “I don’t want to hear that now we’ll just need $300,000 less in fare collectors, because that would be a tremendous disappointment.”

As for the detection system, dream on. That wasn’t even part of the contract approved last week. And no one knew how much it would cost.

Asked an incredulous board member Zev Yaroslavsky: “There’s nobody in this room who knows roughly how much or what order of magnitude we’re talking about for this state-of-the-art, 21st-century security device? I’m amazed.”

Equally amazing, Zev voted for the plan anyways. Even though he couldn’t quite fathom how the device could detect explosives at the turnstile, alert authorities, and end up with the passenger being pounced on before boarding a train. “You expect me to buy that?” asked Zev.

As for special state money to boost transit security, either from voter-approved Proposition 1B, which includes some $16 million to make L.A.-area transportation systems more secure or the federal Homeland Security department, no one had yet taken even the most preliminary steps to apply for it.

Molina couldn’t believe it – but she voted for the project, too.

Heck, it’s only tens of millions of dollars, and Cubic Transportation Systems, Inc. of San Diego certainly isn’t complaining. A prudent board would have waited for the answers and the details. But this Metro board was too eager to hop on board and leave the station with a train carrying only half of the answers.

In case you’re wondering about the genesis of this bad idea, it didn’t begin with concerns about security. Yvonne Burke cleared up that mystery fast. She said it began with a phone call from judges who handle South L.A. criminal cases. They told her that homicides and other felony cases were being delayed by all the fare evaders’ no-show warrants clogging the system.

Somehow, that should be Metro’s problem?

During the discussion about homeland security issues, Burke had a chance to elevate her pitch for the turnstiles to a higher level and proclaim they would help ward off terrorists. But, no, she didn’t want to lose the program nobody needs. “Homeland security was never part of this until recently. You just heard me as to the reason I introduced it.”

If you’re ever trying to flee a subway station during an emergency, go ahead and blame the judges – and Burke, and the flock of board members who followed her into the bleak tunnel where reason and logic do not rule.

What if the turnstiles turn out to be the giant headache for Metro that Katz predicted? Burke came up with a possible solution. “If it doesn’t work, we can go back to not having anything and see what happens.”

When you retire later this year, Yvonne, please leave your forwarding address so Metro knows where to send the bills.

Mommy Times

Bad Case of RGC

Let’s call the L.A. Times’ whiny story about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s travel record in 2008 for what it is – a case of reporter-generated controversy. The only Angelenos who object that the mayor of the second-largest city in the United States is out helping a Democrat’s campaign for the White House are either Republicans or petty enough to cry foul over the color of his kitchen or the day of the week he chooses to ride public transportation to work.

Or, are we to believe that the populace, from Woodland Hills to Watts, from the Westside to Lincoln Heights, is fuming because the mayor slipped out of town several times to help Hillary? Half of them wouldn’t be able to find City Hall on a map. (If you just woke up, eight years of a GOP administration have been devastating for Los Angeles and California – and the world.)

If this were not a fabricated controversy and the masses were truly upset, I’m going to stake out a wild position and suggest that the lead quote in Duke Helfand’s story in Monday’s paper would not have gone to Sandy Brown, the president of the Holmby-Westwood Property Owners Assn. and a critic of his Pico-Olympic one-way plan and the Wilshire Boulevard bus-only lane project. More likely, we would have heard high up in the story from a police official giving a status report on the crowd gathering at the airport, clamoring for the return of our prodigal mayor.

It’s not like Antonio’s taken up residence in Texas, Nevada, New Hampshire, or any of the other primary states. You probably didn’t even notice he was gone, right? If you had, as of Monday, the mayor had been out of state 18 of 65 days so far this year. At least eight of those were on weekend days. So he’s been out of state about one-fourth of the time if you count the five-day work week, not one-third of the time if you follow the Times’ seven-day calendar. If his absence from the city is that big a deal, how many days would be acceptable, or should the mayor be barred from leaving the city limits without a pass from Mommy Times?

L.A. mayors no longer ride in a stagecoach to Dallas. Ladies and gentleman, it’s a three-hour flight. The mayor kept his Blackberry near him at all times. He left behind the police chief to quell any riots.

Consider the big picture: The mayor of Los Angeles is also a citizen of California and of the U.S. What could be better for the city than to have a Democrat in the White House with the power of renewing a commitment to directing federal money to big-city ills, from transportation to public health? You really believe King/Drew would have closed if a Democrat had been president, or that it would have taken Congressman Henry Waxman 23 years to lift his ill-conceived Congressional ban on L.A. subway projects?

But there is one problem with the mayor’s travels. It’s the mayor’s fragile-as-eggshell self-confidence. The dude worries too much about what people think about him. It sure looks like he cut his trip short as soon when he got wind that the Times was putting together a story. He should have picked up the phone himself and explained why, for the good of the city, he was staying in Texas, where today, he could have been taking, in Antonio style, more than his share of the credit for helping to resuscitate Hillary’s campaign.

The lesson here: Let’s all agree that it is the mayor’s job to travel and campaign on behalf of the Democratic nominee, whether it’s Hillary or Barack, without worrying about what Mommy Times might think. If Antonio ends up with a cabinet position, fine; as Plato advised 2,000 years ago, a polity often benefits when its leaders act out of self-interest. Anybody with any trace of clout should do all they can to keep John McCain from unpacking his baggage at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With all the buyouts, can’t editors and reporters at the Times for once be content chasing down real stories?

By the way, if you were looking to the Times editorial writers for some profound advice, don’t bother. A weak editorial this week failed to take a position on the matter and said voters should decide whether the mayor’s campaign travels are good or bad for the city. Well, that shouldn’t provoke too many irate calls to Spring Street, but was canceling the 2009 election ever an option?

We e-mailed Duke to see if he wanted to fire off a round at this barrage. He didn’t respond. Maybe he’s out of town, or, better yet, seeking treatment before his next outbreak of RGC.

End of free parking

UCLA parking guru Don Shoup won more converts last week. The professor tells anyone who will listen that the No. 1 cause of L.A.’s traffic woes is free parking. Make people pay up and the next thing you know, they’ll start vanishing from the roadways, scared off by high parking fees, freeing the streets for the most serious car-mongers.

Councilmember Bill Rosendahl happened to park at the Westwood campus and told his colleagues that he’d paid $2 an hour for a space.

“There’s gold in the gutters,” he told his morose colleagues – or at least the ones not standing up behind their chairs and carrying on their own conversations with staff and others – facing a $400 million or more hole in the city budget next year. Why not raise the 25-cent meter parking throughout L.A. to a buck or more? That could nearly quadruple the parking revenue raised every year and bring in a cool $100 million.

That wasn’t the only money-making venture the council discussed.

Councilmember Janice Hahn wants to see L.A. start charging an oil extraction fee of, say, $1 a barrel. Long Beach charges 40 cents.

How much oil comes out of L.A.? No one seems to know for sure, but she guesses it might be close to 10 million barrels a year. In all of L.A. County, 27 million barrels are extracted.

And someone should give these budding entrepreneurs some credit. You might even start seeing advertisements on the sides of fire trucks and city ambulances. Well, probably not. But they suggested looking into the possibility of selling ad space on city vehicles and selling naming rights to city buildings.

Maybe the prize should be City Hall? It could bear the name of the city lobbyist who spends the most money on behalf of clients every quarter.

Send insults and ammo to BigAl@lasniper.com.