Metro honors the late Richard Alatorre, our first Board Chair 

Rest in peace, Metro Board Chair Richard Alatorre, who passed away Aug. 13 and whose funeral services were held today at the Cathedral of Our City of Angels in downtown Los Angeles. 

Alatorre served as the first Chairman of Metro’s Board of Directors from 1993-94 and was on our Board from ’93 to 1999. He was a native Angeleno — born in Boyle Heights and reared on the Eastside, which he represented in the State Assembly and later on the L.A. City Council. 

His leadership was critical to the success of Metro, which officially formed in 1993 after a merger of the LACTC (which planned projects) and the SCRTD (which ran transit). Chair Alatorre had served on the boards of both agencies and was charged with merging the SCRTD and LACTC into a coherent agency that would plan and fund a variety of mobility projects in L.A. County and operate it across a broad swath of the county.  

The challenges for Alatorre and his colleagues were tremendous. The last of the streetcars had stopped running in 1963. But the population in our region and the number of cars — and traffic — kept growing. Freeway expansion had slowed as more communities pushed back against sprawl, pollution and being cleaved apart by the new roads. Building rail transit was something many people supported — but specific plans often failed to coalesce until the passage of sales tax measures in 1980 and 1990.  

Using those sales tax funds and under the guidance of Alatorre and many others, rail transit made a comeback. In the ‘90s alone, the Blue Line (now the A Line), Green Line (now the C Line) and Red Line (now the B Line) opened. Alatorre, in particular, was a huge supporter of the subway and envisioned extending it one day to East L.A.  

He was also instrumental in pushing for the Gold Line to be built to both Pasadena and East LA (after the subway didn’t make it there). The Gold Line projects were not easy — both at times faced political and funding challenges. Yet both won local support and got built with considerable wrangling from Alatorre and many other local elected officials, including another Eastside pol of considerable influence — Supervisor Gloria Molina, who passed away in 2023.  

Alatorre also played a major role in significant projects that continue to have a positive impact that continues for riders today. For example, he pushed for the Metro headquarters to be built next to Union Station, which he and his frequent ally Mayor Tom Bradly wanted to see refurbished to serve as our region’s transit hub.  

Thanks to his leadership, the Metro Board in 1994 adopted an Alternative Fuel Initiative, which ushered in the end of the era of diesel buses — known for their smelly and visible tailpipe emissions. In 2011, Metro retired the last of its diesel buses in favor of an entire fleet of buses burning cleaner compressed natural gas. We’re now working on converting that fleet to fully zero emissions. 

Alatorre was also charged with work that was key to combining the SCRTD and LACTC intro a forward-looking agency. He met with employees and stakeholders to better understand how Metro should function. He oversaw the agency’s first non-discrimination statement (important to an industry growing more diverse and with a sometimes less-than-stellar history when it came to equity) that went beyond federal guidelines, expanded contracting opportunities for small and disadvantaged firms and identified other key policies that would guide Metro in its early years.  

The entire Metro family extends its sympathies to the Alatorre family and his many friends and supporters across L.A. Our CEO Stephanie Wiggins attended today’s funeral to pay our respects to our first Board Chair whose tenacity and vision will benefit Angelenos for many decades to come.