Tag Archives: Measure J

Reminder: why Election Day matters in Los Angeles if you care about transportation

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Click above to find your polling place.

As you may have heard, there’s a runoff Tuesday in Los Angeles to elect the next mayor of the second-largest city in the nation — a city with about 3.8 million inhabitants and some well-known transportation challenges.

I ran the following post on March 4, the day before the primary election in Los Angeles. I’m running it again today as a reminder to vote in tomorrow’s mayoral election between Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel because whichever succeeds Antonio Villaraigosa will likely have a hand in many important transportation decisions, including project acceleration, the future of congestion pricing projects, the construction of five rail projects and possible changes in Metro’s fare structure in the future.

Look up your polling place here.

Metro is a county agency and is overseen by a 13 member Board of Directors who serve as the deciders on most significant issues. The Mayor of Los Angeles gets a seat on that board and gets to fill three other seats with his appointees.

A majority of the Metro Board — i.e. seven votes — is required to approve most items. Four of those seven votes are controlled by the Los Angeles mayor. That means that the mayor controls more than half the votes needed to approve items that have impacts across Los Angeles County and the region.

Here are some items that are likely to confront the Metro Board in the next four or so years, meaning they’re items likely to confront the lucky soul (if luck is the right word) who becomes the next mayor of the City of Angels and/or Parking Lots:

•There is the not-so-tiny issue of whether to accelerate the building of Measure R projects and, if so, how best to pay for it and which transit and road projects are included. The next mayor may also choose to use their bully pulpit to persuade Congress to adopt the full America Fast Forward program, which would greatly expand funding for transportation projects.

•Although Metro CEO Art Leahy has already said there will be no changes to Metro’s fares in the upcoming fiscal year that begins July 1, he also said it’s an issue that will likely have to be revisited sooner rather than later in order to help Metro keep up with its expenses.

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Transportation headlines, Monday, May 20

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Here is a look at some of the transportation headlines gathered by us and the Metro Library. The full list of headlines is posted on the Library’s Headlines blog, which you can also access via email subscription or RSS feed.

Mayor candidates on transportation: innovation versus tried and true (L.A. Times)

With Election Day tomorrow in Los Angeles, the Times tries to tease apart the differences on transportation policy between Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel. If not much difference on the issues, there may be an issue in style, says one of the academics who is quoted.

As the article points out, the biggest source of influence for the next mayor will be the four seats on the Metro Board of Directors directly under their control (the mayor gets one seat and then can appoint three others). I think perhaps the most interesting revelation, however, was this:

Among likely L.A. city voters in Tuesday’s election, nearly half said they thought policymakers should focus on public transportation, compared with 35% who favored spending on roads and freeways, according to a new poll by the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Los Angeles Times.

 

I think that’s pretty interesting given the car-centric reputation of the area and, of course, interesting if there’s another Measure R or Measure J down the road.

 L.A.’s next mayor to have a regional impact (San Gabriel Valley Tribune) 

Of course, you can say that about any mayoral election in Los Angeles because of the mayor’s voting bloc on the Metro Board. This article makes two points pertinent to the San Gabriel Valley: the next mayor could play a big role in deciding who manages Ontario’s airport in the future (it’s currently run by L.A. but locals want control) and the next mayor plays a big role in decisions made by the Port of Los Angeles, a major driver of freight traffic on roads and rails in the region.
The most provocative part of the article — at least the part in which my coffee almost ended up in my lap — comes from a Montclair council member who says that money for the Purple Line Extension would be better spent on a Gold Line extension to Montclair, a small city in western San Bernardino County. I think a smarter quote would have been to argue that L.A. County needs a transit network that spans almost the entire width of the county; I think that’s something voters get while pols tend to focus only on projects in their district. Shocking, I know.
The Los Angeles Mayor says he has worked closely with the City Council to find $40 million the city could contribute toward a Leimert Park station for the Crenshaw/LAX Line, although it will cost more than that. As part of the bidding process, Metro is seeking a construction firm that can build the optional station within the project’s $1.76-billion budget.
The Metro staff recommendation is supposed to be released soon and the contract could possibly be voted on at the June meeting of the Metro Board — which will also be Villaraigosa’s last Metro Board meeting as mayor. If a vote occurs, it’s a pretty dramatic way for Mayor V to end his eight-year tenure in office. If the issue isn’t decided in June, then Eric Garcetti or Wendy Greuel will confront a big vote early in their term — and they’ve also made some interesting statements about not just adding a station, but also undergrounding the line through Park Mesa Heights, an expensive proposition.

Metro Board to consider change to Measure R expenditure plan as part of latest project acceleration effort

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UPDATE: The item will be considered at April’s meeting of the Metro Board of Directors.

In 2010, the Metro Board of Directors approved the 30/10 plan, the idea being to build 30 years worth of Measure R projects in the next decade. Although it hasn’t yet worked out, that policy is still very much on the books — and Metro staff are still trying to advance Measure R road and transit projects.

The first part of a new acceleration strategy will come before the Metro Board at its monthly meeting on Thursday. In particular, Metro staff are recommending that the Board approve a public notice of a planned change to the Measure R expenditure plan that would allow second- and third-decade Measure R projects to begin receiving funds this decade.

If approved, the proposal would then be vetted by a three-judge panel that provides oversight for Measure R. After the judges release their findings, the plan is for the Metro Board to vote on the new dates for the expenditure plan and a new acceleration plan at the Board’s May meeting.

And what will the acceleration strategy be this time around? I don’t know the details beyond what’s in the staff report issued last week (the report is below). The report shows that Metro is looking at assembling funds from a variety of sources — Measure R, America Fast Forward loans and bonds (30/10 was renamed America Fast Forward in 2011) and possibly revenues from Prop A and C, the half-cent sales tax increases approved by L.A. County voters in 1980 and 1990, respectively.

So stay tuned. As always there’s a lot of balls in the air, particularly at the federal level, where Metro is trying to lock down New Starts money for the Westside Subway Extension and Regional Connector while also getting getting Congress to fully adopt and fund the America Fast Forward plan.

Other actions taken by the Metro Board of Directors today

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•The Board approved a $33.2-million, five-year contract with the California Vanpool Authority, Enterprise Rent-a-Car Company of Los Angeles and VPSI, Inc., to provide vanpool services to Metro. Metro staff report

•The Board voted to accept $26.1 million from the state of California’s Prop 1B to help fund the I-405 Sepulveda Pass Improvements Project. Metro staff report

•The Board did not take a position of support of state bills that would lower the threshold needed for voters to pass a transportation sales tax from two-thirds to 55 percent. Although there were not seven votes (a majority) against supporting the bills, a motion to move the item to next month failed, meaning that a Board Member would likely need to make a motion to bring it back.

The yes votes came from Board Members Richard Katz, Ara Najarian, Pam O’Connor, Mel Wilson and Zev Yaroslavsky. The no votes came from Michael D. Antonovich, Diane DuBois John Fasana and Don Knabe. Absent for the vote were Jose Huizar, Mark Ridley-Thomas, Antonio Villaraigosa and Gloria Molina.

Metro staff had recommended supporting the bills as a possible way to help accelerate transit projects in the future; several Board members had issues ranging from lack of public input to an unwillingness to seek a change because of the narrow loss of Measure J last fall. Metro staff report

•The Board approved a revenue-generating contract with InSite Wireless to install equipment in the Red and Purple Line subway and other underground portions of the Metro Rail system to provide cell phone service and, eventually, wi-fi service for Metro riders. Metro staff report and recent Source post

MoveLA conference tackles thorny issues: among them, should the threshold for future sales tax measures be lowered to 55 percent?

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Photo by Steve Hymon/Metro.

Photo by Steve Hymon/Metro.

I spent a couple of hours at MoveLA’s annual conference at Union Station on Friday. As the group’s name implies, MoveLA — with financial help from Metro — is pushing for an expansion and acceleration of transit projects across Los Angeles County.

Three things I heard that I found intriguing and worth passing along to Source readers:

•County Supervisor and Metro Board Member Zev Yaroslavsky was one of many people calling for the threshold for sales tax ballot measures to be lowered from 66.7 percent (two-thirds) to 55 percent after Measure J lost in November with 66.1 percent of the vote.

Yaroslavsky said it’s a perversion of Prop 13 that general sales tax measures — that is, measures without a specific funding target (such as transportation or education) — only require a simple majority but measures with funding plans and goals must reach a much higher target of two-thirds.

Yaroslavsky also acknowledged that everyone knew ahead of time that Measure J needed 66.7 percent to win and that the campaign wasn’t perfect, nor did it help — in his view and in particular — that turnout was much lower in 2012 than in 2008 when Measure R secured 67.9 percent of the vote.

There is a bill pending in the state Legislature that would change the state Constitution to allow for a 55 percent threshold. If the Legislature approves it and the Governor signs it, the issue would then go to state voters. At this point, Metro doesn’t have any proposal to return to voters although the agency continues to pursue funding for project acceleration from Congress.

•There was a lot of talk, as would be expected, about development near transit stations. It’s pretty clear to me that this is still a very thorny issue in many parts of our region. Among the issues: how much density should be allowed, how much parking should be required at developments and what tools are best to preserve affordable housing near transit stations and areas that are gentrifying.

My three cents: It’s hard to get any affordable units built if the overall number of units allowed to be built is on the low side. Developers will simply walk away. And while I completely understand fears of gentrification, I also think it’s equally dangerous to keep redevelopment at bay because needed money and investment may simply go elsewhere.

•There was a brief conversation about using California cap-and-trade funds as a source of funding for mass transit. That’s an interesting notion, of course. But it depends on cap-and-trade raising some serious money and also state transit agencies firmly being able to quanitfy that their services are reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Metro Board OKs plan to continue planning of second and third decade Measure R projects

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The Metro Board voted Thursday morning to direct staff to continue planning on second- and third decade Measure R projects — the idea is have projects ready to be constructed if funds become available to accelerate them.

Click above to see larger.

Click above to see larger.

The Board also approved the following amendment by Board Members Diane DuBois, Gloria Molina and Mel Wilson:

Here is a recent post about this item, along with the staff report.

Metro Board to consider ongoing planning of second and third decade Measure R transit projects

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One of the key questions facing the Metro Board of Directors at its meeting Thursday: should Metro continue to plan projects that are scheduled to be built in the second and third decades of Measure R?

These include transit projects such as an extension of the Gold Line from East Los Angeles, a Green Line extension from Redondo Beach, the Airport Metro Connector and the West Santa Ana Branch Corridor project.

Some quick background. Measure R is the half-cent sales tax increase approved by Los Angeles County voters in 2008. Measure R expires in mid-2039. The schedule to build transit projects that Measure R will help fund are staggered over the 30 years for a simple reason: the sales tax funds needed to pay for the projects flows into county coffers over time, not all at once.

Even though several projects are not scheduled to completed until the 2020s or 2030s, Metro has been working on the required environmental studies for them. Why? Because the Metro Board has pursued strategies to secure funding to accelerate those projects (such as America Fast Forward). And history has shown time and again that transit projects that are clearly defined with solid plans are more competitive when it comes to winning often scarce money.

There is one important caveat to consider: once finished, environmental studies have a shelf life of about three years. If work doesn’t begin on a project within three years of the completion of the environmental documents, the studies for that project would likely need to be updated, which can be pricey and time-consuming.

Below is the Metro staff report (pdf here). It is scheduled to be considered at the Metro Board of Directors meeting Thursday at 9:00 a.m. at Metro headquarters adjacent to Los Angeles Union Station.

Measure R second and third decade project staff report by

Transportation headlines, Wednesday, Jan. 2

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Here is a look at some of the transportation headlines gathered by us and the Metro Library. The full list of headlines is posted on the Library’s Headlines blog, which you can also access via email subscription or RSS feed.

Art of Transit: The 534 bus on Pacific Coast Highway at sunset last Friday. Photo by Steve Hymon/Metro.

Art of Transit: A southbound 534 bus on Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica at sunset last Friday. Photo by Steve Hymon/Metro.

Lankershim Boulevard rises to prominence in the Valley (L.A. Times) 

Another excellent dispatch in Christopher Hawthorne’s series on the past, present and future of significan streets in Southern California. In this, Hawthorne notes that the stretch of Lankershim that runs above the Red Line subway has become the most vital north-south connection in the San Fernando Valley and that the subway, in turn, has been the primary driver in reviving North Hollywood’s pedestrian-oriented Arts District.

Hawthorne also turns his attention to two projects involving Metro: a pedestrian tunnel under Lankershim to connect the Red Line’s NoHo station to the Orange Line terminus and a pedestrian bridge over the street at Universal City to connect the station entrance to Universal City proper. Hawthorne doesn’t like either project. Excerpt:

Putting pedestrians and drivers into separate silos of space, as the bridge-and-tunnel plan would do, isn’t just a remnant of modernist urban-planning theories that have been widely discredited. It would send drivers a clear message that they’re in control of the boulevard, free to drive even faster than they do now.

Simple and far cheaper solutions at both locations — widen the crosswalks, give people more time to get from one side to the other and ticket drivers who fail to yield — would have the benefit of smoothing the pedestrian flow and making the intersections safer at the same time.

Yet that approach has won little support from Metro, for one basic reason: What’s driving the proposals to remove pedestrians from the boulevard is not just a concern for their safety. It’s also a fear of traffic congestion along Lankershim, a worry that all those people on foot are proving an impediment to the free movement of cars.

I haven’t heard much from readers about the bridge at Universal City.  I have, however, sensed there is considerable reader support for the Red Line-Orange Line tunnel because many people would rather avoid crossing a busy street. I do think there is a very real ongoing conflict in Los Angeles about how much officials are willing to disrupt car traffic for transit, bike and pedestrian projects.

Tunnel beneath the Sepulveda Pass? It could happen quicker with private money (Daily News) 

At last month’s Board of Directors meeting, a motion was passed to consider public-private financing for the Sepulveda Pass transit project. The project is still undefined but among the alternatives considered to date are a bus rapid transit project or possibly a tunnel that could carry both toll lanes and a rail line. In the story, a Metro official says that private financing could speed up the project by years — under Measure R it’s scheduled to be complete by 2039 — and that tolls may be low because of the volume of cars that would use the tunnel.

My two cents: obviously the project has to pencil out before any private firm throws their money into it — they’ll need to know that tolls and/or fares will cover the cost of construction and then some. It will also take a long time to build a tunnel — the Sepulveda Pass project still needs to be defined, environmentally cleared, designed, financed and then built. It’s great that Metro is trying to beat the 2039 Measure R date, but I think we have to still be realistic and realize that such a project is likely not opening in the near term.

How far from the airport should the LAX people mover start? (Curbed LA)

The post is simply a recap of Yonah Freemark’s excellent article at Transport Politic about LAX’s recent offer of land to Metro for a rail station near the airport (he favors a people mover with a station adjacent to the Crenshaw/LAX Line’s Aviation/Century station. The comments along with the post are interesting and give you a flavor of what a variety of people want from this project.

We need a new Measure J…are L.A. County’s supes up for it? (CityWatch) 

Ken Alpern poses the hypothetical question to each of the five supervisors (he didn’t literally ask them) and points out that a re-fashioned Measure J could be consistent with each of their stated goals. Specifics are short, but Alpern seems to be thinking along the lines of a measure that would have funding for new transit projects and fully fund others already on the Measure R list. I suspect a lot of water still must pass under the bridge before another measure to extend Measure R goes to voters.

 

Reader poll results: Expo Line opening was the big story of 2012!

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The results. Ignore the ‘country’ column — it’s the same as the overall results.

Thanks to everyone who took our poll on the biggest transportation stories in 2012. As the above chart demonstrates, the verdict was pretty clear: the opening of the first phase of the Expo Line was the big to-do in the minds of many readers.

My take on a few of the year’s big storylines:

•Perhaps the biggest overall story of 2012 was the unceasing expansion of transit in Los Angeles County. The first phase of the Expo Line opened, the Orange Line Extension opened, the new El Monte Station opened, the Crenshaw/LAX Line went out to bid, the pace of construction quickened on both the second phase of the Expo Line and the Gold Line Foothill Extension and the environmental studies were completed for the Regional Connector and Westside Subway Extension — with early utility work now underway for both.

Four years after the passage of Measure R, it’s pretty clear that L.A. County is serious about transforming itself and building a transit network to compliment its sprawling road network. It has been a long time coming — and it’s great to see.

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Agenda posted for Thursday's meeting of the Metro Board of Directors

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Metro December 2012 agenda.

Here’s the agenda for the final Metro Board of Directors’ meeting of 2012. The public portion of the meeting begins at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday at Metro HQ adjacent to Union Station. Members of the public, as always, are welcome to attend; the meeting is in the Board Room on the 3rd floor. Those who can’t attend can also listen to the meeting over the phone by calling 213-922-6045.

I’m guessing it will be a loooong meeting. Among the items to be discussed are a contract with CBS Outdoors to sell advertising on Metro properties (the Board couldn’t muster the votes to approve it when it was discussed earlier in the fall), a presentation on Metro’s safety culture and a discussion over how to proceed on America Fast Forward now that Measure J has lost.