MTA BAIT-AND-SWITCH
Reporter Dan Abendschein had an article in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune yesterday that said that the Gold Line Foothill Extension Authority may have to wait until 2011 before it starts to get any of that promised revenue from the half-cent sales tax increase L. A. County voters approved last November with Measure R.
No surprise there. The county's Metropolitan Transportation Authority sold the sales tax increase to voters in our area with the promise that the MTA would come through with money for the Gold Line extension. However, the MTA also ended up costing the Gold Line $320 million in federal money that it could have qualified for had the MTA simply come through with a matching grant of $80 million. Instead, the MTA denied the Gold Line that money and promised to come through with $735 million if Measure R passed.
Cynics, including the Insider, thought that once the sales tax increase was approved, the MTA, headed by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, would renege on the promise and would give West L. A.'s Subway-to-the-Sea first dibs on any money. And that may be exactly what's happening now.
Westsiders would say that their needs are more pressing, but San Gabriel Valley residents have argued that traffic in this area is every bit as bad as West L. A./Santa Monica and that the SGV doesn't receive nearly as much in benefits as it pays out to fund things like Measure R. Residents in our area would also argue that whereas the Gold Line is ready to go, the Subway-to-the-Sea is still in the planning stages.
And, no matter what your position is on which project is more deserving, the bait-and-switch tactics the MTA and Villaraigosa used to get Measure R passed certainly speaks volumes about the integrity (or lack thereof) involved here.
Dan Abendschein's article gave some of the details:
The Gold Line Foothill Extension may not be receive significant Measure R funding until 2011, and may not be completed until 2017, if the county's transit agency passes a proposed long-range plan.
The Gold Line Foothill Extension Authority, the independent agency charged with building the line, estimated a completion date of 2013 last month, after the passage of Measure R, the half-cent sales tax increase designed to fund county transportation projects.
If the long range plan is approved, the Foothill Extension Authority would probably not even see any tax money until 2013, according to Habib Balian, the group's director, who reviewed a report outlining the plan.
"There is not a lot of detail in the report, so we still have a lot of questions," said Balian. "But this action would appear to delay our funding."
David Yale, the Deputy Executive Officer of Regional Programming for the Metropolitan Transportation Agency said the Extension Authority would start to receive serious levels of funding in 2011.
The project could see "a little bit of funding" in 2010 from 2009 sales tax revenues, said Yale. MTA previously said the Gold Line would begin getting funding in 2010, but did not specify how much.
PADUA PARK FUNDING DELAY CONFIRMED
The Daily Bulletin's Wes Woods II had an article that verified what we had wondered about the lack of construction activity at the Padua Ave. Park site in Northeast Claremont.As you'll recall, last month we wrote about the fact that the San Gabriel and Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, the state agency that gave Claremont a $850,000 grant for the Padua Park project, was unable to come through with the grant because of the state's financial situation.
The state has placed a moratorium on the sale of bonds until its potential $42 billion deficit can be fixed. Woods explained in his article:
Belinda Faustinos, executive director of the San Gabriel & Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, noted Friday that a statewide freeze was ordered on bond funds Dec. 17.
Faustinos said there would be a meeting Tuesday with the Pooled Money Investment Board.
That board determines the amount of bond funds that can be sold and therefore how much cash is available for bond projects.
"Unless they authorize the sale of bonds, there is no money to spend for those types of projects," Faustinos said.
Faustinos said there is not expected to be much progress unless the state comes up with a solution to the budget crisis.
Woods also quoted Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor as saying:
"We're trying in many different ways to approach it," Mayor Ellen Taylor said Friday. Taylor was upset the money was frozen but said the council has "lots of plans. I can't go into the details right now, they're in the infancy stage. There have been no firm decisions made."
In other words, the city will get this done somehow, some way, even if we have to pay for the whole thing ourselves by shuffling money around in the old Claremont shell game. The City can put off paying police officers the pay and benefits it promised them, but it can come through with $850,000 for Ellen's pet project. As one friend of the Insider remarked about that prospect, "That's sick."
No, that's Claremont.
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