CommentsCOMMENTARY--The City of LA’s elected officials do not like State Senator Tony Mendoza’s efforts to bring much-needed reform to the governance structure of LACMTA (the LA County Metropolitan Transit Authority). Not only do LA’s elected officials reject Mendoza’s latest bill SB 268, they do it with a vehemence which suggests they doth protest too much.
When you think about it, it should hardly be a shocker that LA is trying to defend its disproportionately large influence on the MTA Board, but evidently none of the officials offering up such barbed criticism have thought about the logical implications of their self-serving position.
The current 13-member MTA Board has a very uneven distribution of seats. The math is both simple and compelling: the 87 cities, outside the City of Los Angeles, collectively have around 5.2 million residents, while Los Angeles has 3.9 million. The four MTA board members representing the city of LA equal the four representing the other 87 cities. Again, simple math which shows that the 87 cities are underrepresented by 57.8% compared with the city of Los Angeles.
It is clear that the current distribution of the MTA Board and the lack of proportional representation is unfair, and has resulted in uneven allocation of resources and services. It has also resulted in a LACMTA which despite occasional attempts at window-dressing governs from the top down, often acting both unresponsively and arrogantly towards the very cities it is supposed to serve.
LA is already the 800 pound gorilla in the county, and because of the way the MTA governance structure was set up some three decades ago as the result of political maneuvering in Sacramento, it gets to throw around 1300 pounds of weight. With the passage of Measure M, literally billions of additional transit dollars are at stake and it is imperative, now more than ever, to redress the imbalance and lack of proportional representation on the MTA board.
The elected officials of LA use terms such as "wrong on so many levels," "nuts," "alternative facts" and "childish" to describe SB 268. SB 268 is essentially an effort to apply the principles of "one person, one vote" to the MTA board, which is currently a politicized organ, unresponsive to the needs of all the residents in the county and in which the city of LA sometimes acts like the 1300 pound gorilla.
However, notwithstanding the pure self-interest behind the language used by the LA representatives, it is extremely disappointing that elected officials in LA evidently have such a problem with the concept of "one person, one vote," especially Mayor Eric Garcetti, who may be prepping a run for the nation’s highest office.
In general, Mayor Garcetti has tried to engage in outreach with the smaller cities in the county, but if he isn’t willing to share decision making in a fair and equitable manner, it doesn’t amount to more than “happy talk” from another politician looking to climb up the ranks to the White House.
Mendoza’s bill proposes a 15-member Board so that the 87 cities have 7 members (47% of the seats); the City of Los Angeles has 6 members (40% of the seats); and the Board of Supervisors has 2 members (13% of the seats, representing the residents living in unincorporated areas, representing about a million people).
While this new board structure would still overrepresent the city of Los Angeles, and underrepresent the 87 cities outside of Los Angeles, it is a significant move in the right direction, as it not only would mark an important shift towards proportional representation, it would also end institutionalized bloc voting, a major obstacle to fair consensus building (the mayor of LA personally controls four out of the 13 MTA votes).
Importantly, Senator Mendoza is also considering offering a purely local option, by which LACMTA, the County, the city of Los Angeles, the LA County Division of the League of California Cities, the Independent Cities Association of LA County, the Contract Cities Association of LA County and the LA County City Selection Committee (of which I am the vice-chair) would jointly negotiate an updated LACMTA governance structure which would reflect the goal of fair and proportional representation, rooted in local control. This is an option worthy of strong support, provided it is truly formed by consensus and agreed upon within a reasonable time frame.
Not surprisingly, there have been a number of letters of opposition from LACMTA sub-contractors and other LACMTA associated organizations and special interest groups, which all try to make the same points and express the same objections to SB 268. While it is obvious these letters have been carefully orchestrated by LACMTA and its lobbyists, the expressed concerns often have as little basis in reality as the ironically titled “Fact Sheet” which LACMTA is circulating in opposition to SB 268.
One of the copy-and-paste lines from a number of the letters contends: “The composition of the Metro Board was the result of a lengthy, local process in which all local stakeholders were brought together to develop a consensus.” This statement is simply not true. The current structure of the MTA Board was the result of political maneu vering and power-brokering in Sacramento by the likes of legislative kingpins Willie Brown and Richard Katz almost three decades ago which by design gave the city of LA disproportionate influence; it was not the result of a “bottoms up” process involving all local stakeholders. Why would 87 cities in the county which make up more than half the population ever voluntarily agree to be underrepresented by almost 60%?
Importantly, neither LACTMA’s “Fact Sheet” nor any of the copy-and-paste opposition letters address the current lack of proportional representation on the LACTMA board nor the problems which arise from the democratic deficits which arise with a board which does not even broadly adhere to the principle of “one person, one vote.”
A number of letters, including LACTMA’s “Fact Sheet” suggest the recent passage of Measure M “was the result of an extensive, bottoms-up process to develop the measure.”
In fact, passage of Measure M is a textbook case which calls out for significant campaign finance reform as the advocates for Measure M outspent the opponents by a margin of 200 to 1. Furthermore, the passage of Measure M is more reflective of LA County residents’ frustration with traffic and the advertising campaign’s promise to “reduce traffic.”
In fact, with the passage of Measure M and many additional billions of dollars of funding at stake, it is even more imperative that LACMTA’s long-standing democratic deficit and lack of fair, proportional representation for the entire county be addressed immediately. LACTMA’s “Fact Sheet” suggests that SB 268 “only creates winners and losers” yet ignores the status quo which in itself perpetuates an entrenched system of winners and losers.
In fact, SB 268 has been developed by Senator Mendoza as a result of the frustrations which many of the 87 cities in LA County share at LACTMA’s lack of responsiveness when it comes to the needs of all our residents. Reduced ridership throughout LACTMA’s system despite significantly increased expenditures is simply one source of frustration for cities which are more concerned with improving mobility than rewarding LACMTA’s “winners” with the current, politicized board. Quite naturally, a politicized, unrepresentative board also leads to skewed decision-making and the expenditure of funds which may benefit special interests, but which do not offer the county’s residents the best value-for-money.
Over the past year Senator Mendoza has held regular meetings with various stakeholders: representatives from cities from throughout the county, including representatives from LACTMA and the city of Los Angeles. I have participated in these meetings along with colleagues from other cities in the county, and various iterations of the bill have improved markedly because of the local input and Senator Mendoza’s grassroots efforts.
With a balanced Board, it is clear as I have argued in the past (), that the MTA will be more attuned to the needs of all residents of the County and provide the 87 smaller cities, which account for more than half the population of the county, the opportunity to better benefit from the large financial resources that the county taxpayers have voted to provide to the MTA with the 2% sales tax levies (Propositions A, C, R and M).
The status quo is simply not acceptable and we must not allow the entrenched interests of the naysayers from the Transportation Construction Industrial Complex to cause inertia and preclude all of the residents of LA County from getting fair and proportional representation, not to mention the kind of transportation system we deserve. At the end of the day, LACMTA board reform is a matter of fairness, social justice, good government – and, ultimately, mobility. Let’s hope our friends and colleagues in the city of Los Angeles eventually come to appreciate that the basis for it all is the wisdom of the principle of “one person, one vote.”
(John Mirisch is a Beverly Hills City Councilman and Vice-Chair, Los Angeles County City Selection Committee. He is a CityWatch and Huff Post contributor.)
-cw
