MTA REJECTS ORDER COMPLIANCE; BOARD VOTES TO EXPAND, BUT LESS THAN MANDATED.

Byline: Douglas Haberman Daily News Staff Writer

The MTA board voted behind closed doors Thursday to expand its bus fleet to reduce passenger crowding but rejected buying all the buses that a federal court-appointed official ordered earlier this month.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority board also called for discussions with the court-appointed special master to see if he will let the transit agency attempt to cut bus crowding through methods less costly than full compliance with his March 8 order.

The Bus Riders Union, a group representing MTA bus passengers, angrily denounced the board's decision, which union leaders described as tantamount to a decision to appeal the order.

Marching out of the board room, union activists chanted, ``we'll be back,'' and ``it ain't over yet.''

The closed session vote was 12-1, with Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich the lone dissenter, MTA spokesman Ed Scannell said.

The board voted to expand its fleet by 160 buses instead of the 532 buses Special Master Donald Bliss ruled the agency must add in the next few years so fewer riders are forced to stand during peak hours.

Bliss oversees the MTA's compliance with a court-sanctioned agreement, known as a consent decree, that resulted from a lawsuit against the MTA by the Bus Riders Union and civil rights groups.

That lawsuit challenged the transit agency's large outlays for rail projects compared to its spending on buses, which are the mainstay of its operations and are used by the vast majority of MTA passengers.

The MTA must notify Bliss today of the board's decision.

The board said the additional 160 buses will come from 2,095 buses the MTA previously decided to purchase by 2004 to replace its aging, breakdown-prone fleet.

However, BRU officials said the special master's order makes it clear that the extra buses he ordered to reduce crowding must be above and beyond the 2,095 replacement buses.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member, said the vote was a time-buying compromise that actually staved off a decision to appeal the March 8 order.

``I think before the board takes a precipitous action . . . we may be able to find common ground'' with the BRU and other civil rights groups, Yaroslavsky said in an interview after the vote.

The board's options Thursday were to appeal the order to a federal judge, ask Bliss for clarification or reconsideration of his decision, or comply with the order.

MTA officials said full compliance would be too costly.

Julian Burke, the agency's chief executive officer, told board members that full compliance with the order would cost $800 million over five years. He said the MTA will have $300 million available in that period but would have to take the other $500 million from other projects such as road and highway improvements.

``The MTA is not exclusively a bus-operating agency,'' Burke said in a telephone interview after the board vote.

If the MTA were to comply fully, it also would have to consider taking funds from the Pasadena Blue Line, the Alameda Corridor freight rail-line project, and from funds that were set aside for alternatives to the now-suspended Eastside and Mid-City subway extensions, officials said.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, the MTA board chairman, said it isn't just Bliss' ruling that's Draconian - it's the consent decree itself, which in hindsight has requirements that don't make sense, he told reporters.

``I was misled by the (MTA) staff'' when he agreed to the consent decree in 1996, Riordan said.

``Consent decrees are not made on Mount Sinai,'' Riordan added.

Earlier, in a public session before the board went behind closed doors for debate and the vote, members of the public complained of the treatment of bus riders, who include poor and minority residents.

The Rev. James Lawson Jr. compared the situation to the treatment of African-Americans in the Southern states during previous decades.

``What you have done . . . is precisely what went on there,'' said Lawson, who was on the advance staff of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birmingham campaign in the early 1960s. Lawson is now pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles.