Metro welcomes Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass as the newest member of the Metro Board of Directors. With her swearing in as the mayor of the City of Los Angeles in December, she replaced former Mayor Eric Garcetti.With her focus on providing a unified approach to addressing the homelessness crisis [continue reading]
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced Wednesday that that U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) will be restoring and expanding the Local Hire program launched during the Obama Administration. This is good news as local hiring has been a major priority of the Metro Board of Directors — the Board wants [continue reading]
A federal grant totaling nearly $1.3 billion to help build the third and final phase of the Metro Purple Line Extension to the Westwood/VA Hospital in Westwood was sent today [continue reading]
This is important. In one sentence it means this: Metro can specifically target hiring workers who live near projects receiving federal funding. Here’s the update from Metro CEO Phil Washington: Last night, Congresswoman Karen Bass (D-37) offered an amendment on the House floor to the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development [continue reading]
Rep. Karen Bass (D-37th District) praised Metro’s local hiring program during testimony at the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday. Bass wrote the legislation for a federal pilot program that will allow transportation agencies to consider hiring local workers for future transit and highway project that use federal funds. Up to now, agencies that [continue reading]
This is good news for Metro, which had lobbied for a change in the law. The issue: up-to-now, Metro was prohibited from hiring workers based on where they lived on [continue reading]
The amendment was authored by Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles). It’s still not the law of the land, but is significant. The issue is that receiving federal funding for projects comes with strings attached in terms of restrictions on local hiring preferences. Here is the news release from her office: [continue reading]
This is an important issue because local transit agencies are currently prohibited from creating local hiring programs when using federal funds for projects. The rationale has been that all Americans should have access to jobs created with national funding, but the policy fails to take into account that most of [continue reading]
The message in this letter is simple: it asks House Republicans to preserve funding for New Starts, the federal program that helps local areas build transit projects. It’s the pot of money that Metro wants to tap to help pay for two key and pricey Measure R projects: the Westside [continue reading]
