" Perry Crouch exercised his right of free speech and paid dearly for it. The veteran South Central L.A. activist spoke out at a public hearing on the Alameda Corridor project and the next thing he knew his life was a train wreck. He lost his job and when he tried to find a new one, prospective employers wanted nothing to do with him.

At first, Crouch's firing seemed like a frightening lesson about criticizing people more powerful than yourself -- especially when they can influence how millions of dollars in public funds are spent. But nearly two years and two lawsuits later, the meek and the powerful seem to have switched places. A jury awarded Crouch more than $650,000 for his ordeal.
It was a long, convoluted, and ultimately costly saga that started at a 1998 state Senate hearing on the $2.4 billion Alameda Corridor project held at South Gate City Hall. At that meeting, Crouch complained about potential conflicts of interest among contractors and a law firm doing business with the corridor …"

Despite a long-standing promise to train and hire low-income people, officials of the $2.4-billion Alameda Corridor project revealed Thursday that they are falling far short of their goals to recruit workers from the cities along the route of the new rail link. The shortfalls prompted members of the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority board to criticize the effectiveness of the project's hiring efforts and its $10-million program to provide job training to 1,000 underprivileged people over the next two years.

One of the authority's goals is for 30% of all work hours on the project to be performed by employees recruited from the nine cities along the corridor's route. Some of those cities contain the county's poorest neighborhoods. The project was 81 workers short of the mark at the end of last year. To fulfill another goal, 60 to 70 graduates of the agency's job training program should have been hired by the corridor's contractors as of December 1999, but only 11 were employed at that time.
"Something must be wrong if only 11 graduates are working for the project," Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said at the authority's board meeting Thursday. "There needs to be some real analysis done" of this effort. The Alameda Corridor is a 20-mile-long toll route for trains that is designed to improve the movement of cargo to and from the county's fast-growing ports. It is scheduled to be finished by the end of 2002.

Work on the new route is expected to create between 8,700 and 9,200 local jobs over the life of the project, or about 1,300 positions a year. As of December, about 600 people were on the job. The corridor's recruitment goals and educational opportunities have been of critical importance to residents and elected officials in such cities as Compton, South Gate and Lynwood, which have had unemployment rates as high as 30%.

Hiring and job training is overseen by the corridor authority, but it is administered and implemented by a team of construction firms headed by Tutor-Saliba Corp. of Sylmar. "We are behind at this point," said Larry Wiggs, community relations manager of the Tutor-Saliba consortium. "But 90% of the work remains to be done and we have another two years to attain our goals." Wiggs and corridor officials attributed the shortfalls to recruiting problems, high dropout rates and the placement of many program graduates in construction jobs unrelated to the corridor.
Although Los Angeles' port has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for the corridor, statistics show that the hiring of Los Angeles residents fell short of the corridor's goal by 12%. "This is unacceptable," said authority board member and Los Angeles City Councilman Rudy Svorinich. "Why is my city lagging behind when Los Angeles is a major stakeholder in the corridor? We should be reaping the benefits of this project."

Alameda project ex-official gives her side of story
6.23.99   Dan Weikel L.A.Times pB1

The former controller and chief financial officer for the $2-billion Alameda Corridor project said Tuesday that she committed an egregious error when she transferred $3 million in project funds into her personal bank account in February. "This is all from the simple click of a mouse," said Nancy Schafer, who was dismissed from her post at the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority about a week after the transaction. "I don't know how much longer I will have to pay for this."
Although Schafer said she accepts responsibility for the mistake, she contends that other agency executives, who she says are charged with double-checking transfers of funds, may have failed to do their jobs. In one internal memo she provided to The Times, Schafer told agency officials Feb. 25 that the checks and balances designed to control project funds are meaningless if people don't use them. "Others might be negligent in their roles," she wrote.

Schafer, of Dana Point, was removed from the job 3.1.99. The Los Angeles County district attorney's office and the corridor authority have been looking into the transaction to determine what happened. Last week, the Los Angeles city controller's office called for an independent audit committee to oversee corridor authority expenditures and contracts as the project heads into its most important phase. In an interview with The Times, Schafer, a financial consultant, detailed her version of the events that led to her sudden departure from a job she had held almost 2 years.
She was responsible for managing hundreds of millions of dollars in government funds and bond proceeds earmarked for the main portions of the project. Her salary was $83,762 annually. Major work is scheduled to begin soon on the most expensive element of the Alameda Corridor: a 10-mile concrete-lined trench that will contain two train tracks. Overall, the new rail and truck route will extend 20 miles from the county's ports to transcontinental freight yards near downtown Los Angeles.

Schafer said the mistake occurred during the first two transfers of proceeds from the corridor authority's sale of $1 billion in revenue bonds. About $3 million, she recalled, needed to be sent from a bond trust account to a corridor authority operating account, so contractors could be paid. Two transfer requisitions, which Schafer supplied to The Times, show that the paperwork was prepared Feb. 19. The documents were signed by Schafer and project construction and engineering dir. Tim Buresh
The requisitions, however, bear Schafer's personal Bank of America account number, instead of that of the agency's operating account. Schafer said that before the requisitions were prepared, she had uploaded information from a Palm Pilot, a hand-held computer, into her regular computer at agency headquarters in Carson. Her Palm Pilot was supplied by the agency. The uploaded information, she said, happened to contain her bank account number, appointments and credit card numbers. She said she kept those personal items in her agency-owned Palm Pilot as a matter of convenience. Schafer said that Feb. 23, the day of the transfer, she called up what she thought were agency accounts on her office computer and mistakenly selected her bank account as the destination for the $3 million.

She said she did not recognize her own account number or realize that it could easily be confused with agency accounts because they too were at the Bank of America. "My bank data somehow got uploaded from my Palm Pilot," she said. "That is how it happened." Schafer said she did not consider her personal use of the Palm Pilot a breach of the agency's financial controls. "It was human error," she said. "Just a freak accident." According to Schafer, the transfer requisitions bearing her account number were sent to Buresh, corridor authority Treasurer James P. Preusch, the bond trustee and the agency's investment managers.

Although an agency manual contained the appropriate corridor account number for bank transaction, Schafer said, apparently no one checked the requisitions for accuracy before the transfer was made. "This is an example of how even the best system in the world can break down for a day," she said. "I did everything in accordance with our procedures."
Authority chief executive James C. Hankla's only comment on Schafer's remarks was: "Clearly, the controller has the primary responsibility." He said he could not discuss the situation further because it is a personnel matter. Sources told The Times last week that the Bank of America initiated steps to return the $3 million to the agency. But Schafer said she discovered the transfer during lunch an hour after the funds were moved. Schafer recalled that she was trying to balance her checkbook and called the bank for account information. "It said I had a balance of over $3 million in my account," she said. "I thought, 'Oh, my God. Did I do what I think I did?' "

Schafer said she immediately called the bank, contacted the corridor authority's top managers and arranged to have the money returned to the agency within hours. Although Schafer said she uncovered the problem, sources said again Tuesday that the bank had started to look into the transfer independently of Schafer. Schafer said she fully cooperated with an internal review of the transfer, offering her personal financial records for scrutiny.

Loose and lax with big money
6.24.99   editorial L.A. Times pB8

There's cause for alarm whenever a goodly sum of public money, $3 million in this case, winds up in the personal bank account of the chief financial officer of a public agency. It's a bad situation whether the money was in that account for only a few hours or a few days. It doesn't matter that the entire sum was returned intact. It doesn't matter whether the mistake was found and corrected by the same public official.
That's why Nancy Schafer, now the former controller and chief financial officer of the $2-billion Alameda Corridor project, was fired recently.

That was the correct response, but a few other things still need resolution. Times reporter Dan Weikel, for example, quoted inside sources who said that it was Schafer's bank that noticed the huge sum of money in her account and raised a warning flag. But Schafer and other Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority officials have said that it was Schafer who found her own mistake, notified her superiors and corrected the error. For the purposes of this argument, none of that matters.

Of more concern is this: Why in blazes was the CFO of one of the nation's biggest public works projects conducting such big-money business from a hand-held electronic organizer that also contained links to her private bank account? Under what checks and balances or chain of command was she able to move such sums on her own?
Where were the internal backstops, the folks who say, "Excuse me, what did you just do?"
The Alameda Corridor is a high-speed rail transport route that will connect the bustling ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to inland transcontinental railroad connections. It will be a vital upgrade to port operations and to the Southern California economy. But it's important for a symbolic reason as well. It's a chance to show that the region can tackle a major construction project and not bollix it. Corridor officials said that such transactions now require two authorizations and can be made only between project accounts.

That's good, but Los Angeles City Controller Rick Tuttle's call for an audit is still worthwhile. It might point out other flaws before another seven-figure mistake is made.

You want to know where the thought of L.A. traffic will make you feel like crying?
Drive to Overland Avenue just north of the Santa Monica Freeway and stop when you see the sign that says:
"RR Crossing"
Don't worry about getting hit by a train, by the way. The tracks are still there on both sides of Overland, but they haven't carried a train in nearly 20 years, when freight service was discontinued.

Until 1953, there was passenger service too, with trains gliding along on what was known as the Santa Monica Air Line. The rail service was touted in 1920s advertisements as all the more reason to buy a new home in Cheviot Hills, where lucky Angelenos could hop aboard "the airline to the beaches."
Cheviot Hills resident and historian Jonathan Weiss pointed this out as he led me and a neighbor, Sarah Hays, on a tour of the abandoned rail line. We walked from Overland in an easterly direction all the way to the Santa Monica Freeway with Hays' daughter and one of her pals.

You can hear the distant whoosh of freeway traffic, but otherwise there's not a sound along the right of way, which is roughly the size of a four-lane highway on this particular stretch and even wider west of Overland.
That's the maddening part. The 15-mile Expo Line, which would run from Santa Monica to USC, was purchased by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1990. The plan was to run buses or light-rail cars along the route, turning north near USC and heading all the way to downtown Los Angeles. Studies suggested that it would instantly become one of the busiest passenger lines in the country.

But this is Los Angeles, and nothing got done. So you stand out there on the right of way, gritting your teeth, wondering why, at the very least, it couldn't have been turned into a greenbelt and bikeway.
Funding concerns, politics, regional and ethnic divisions, the usual lack of imagination and leadership, and frenzied neighborhood opposition have kept an invaluable transit route idle. And even now, with the MTA finally beginning to design the phase of the project that will run from Culver City to the west, the Cheviot Hills Homeowners Assn. voted 14 to 0 on Jan. 3 to oppose use of the right of way.

People in Cheviot and nearby communities along the right of way have expressed concerns about noise and proximity to schools and houses, noting that trains would be within 50 feet of some homes and possibly reduce property values.
But don't call them NIMBYs, homeowner association President Kevin Hughes told me.
"Cheviot Hills doesn't need light rail as much as Venice and Sepulveda do," he said, explaining that Cheviot homeowners would rather have the line run in a more southerly route along Venice Boulevard and then north on Sepulveda Boulevard.

Those communities are denser, he argued, and in greater need of transit options than their more affluent neighbors to the north.
Maybe so, but there's a problem with that logic: There's no preexisting railroad right of way along Venice Boulevard.
Hughes contacted me to compliment me on a column in which I said the city shouldn't have approved two 47-story condo towers and other projects in Century City before having a transit plan in place to handle the increased traffic. Then why is he anti-transit a few miles away in Cheviot?

"It is a bit glib to dismiss an affluent, well-maintained neighborhood as 'rich, selfish NIMBYs,' " he said in an e-mail. "Sometimes the NIMBYs have a point and sometimes the city has an interest in preserving its nice neighborhoods. Cheviot Hills is desirable because the hard-working, friendly, generous people who live there care a lot."
What, and the residents of the communities to the south are a bunch of selfish deadbeats?

"NIMBYism is NIMBYism, regardless of the neighborhood," argued another Cheviot resident. Bob Simon, a physician, received Hughes' e-mail response to me because he's a member of the homeowner association board and Hughes sent it to all 15 members.
Simon told me he favors light rail on the railroad right of way but mistakenly voted against it at the Jan. 3 meeting, thinking he was voting on whether they should vote. After receiving a copy of Hughes' e-mail to me, he issued a stinging response in which he called the homeowner association's position hypocritical.

"ALL COMMUNITIES in this city need light rail," Simon wrote. "We are crammed with outrageous traffic and need alternative transportation. To say that Cheviot doesn't need access to transportation is to negate all of the arguments we have used for years against [Century City] development."
He went on to say that preservation of the precious neighborhood is not at stake, because the right of way runs alongside rather than through Cheviot Hills "for less than 1/4 mile."

Hughes called Simon a cheap-shot artist and said the board represented the majority view of residents based on a recent survey. That majority view prevailed through the 1990s as well, with Cheviot residents using their considerable influence on L.A. County Supervisor and MTA board member Zev Yaroslavsky, among others.
"Why punish ourselves on a route that has so many problems," Yaroslavsky said in March 2000, when he and the MTA board voted 11 to 1 to study his proposed alternative along Venice Boulevard.

So it'll be more than a little interesting to see Yaroslavsky's next move. Ever since I wrote 1.7.07 that Yaroslavsky has had it with traffic, readers have lambasted him for his long opposition to subways, his approval of massive developments without adequate transit options and for now complaining about the mess they accuse him of helping to create.
We're still several years away from seeing the Expo Line open for business, but some important decisions have to be made soon. Yaroslavsky tells me he won't take a position on the best route for the Expo Line until the MTA completes a study of both routes, probably a year from now.

It's a topic worthy of full-blown public debate, and a former MTA executive and current member of the Cheviot Hills Homeowners Assn. offered his two cents' worth in an e-mail to me.
"The population density along Palms/Culver, which includes multifamily housing, would make available low-cost transit to thousands of residents along that corridor," wrote Anthony J. Padilla, who thinks the southerly route makes far more sense.
"This does not even consider the hundreds of businesses that would benefit from having thousands of new customers available to them, reduce the need for parking space which could be utilized to more effectively expand a business and an expanded employee pool of qualified candidates who can travel efficiently to work at a reasonable cost."

But we also know that the southerly route would be longer by more than a mile, that it would block traffic at more crossings than would the other line, that it would take longer to get from one end to the other and that it would cost as much as $50 million to $100 million more to build because of its length.
In a perfect world, the Expo Line would have a branch along both routes. But when you walk along the old right of way, it's maddening to think it might never be put back to use in a city choked with traffic and smog.

Shouldn't one goal of transit be to get people out of their cars as well as to serve those who have no wheels? If so, what better place to offer rail than in a neighborhood of homes with two-car garages and an abandoned train route the taxpayers have already bought and paid for?