Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa also sent a letter to the supervisors, asking them to reconsider. "No matter how you cut it," he wrote, "the taxpayers and voters will be the ultimate losers if the board refuses to place the MTA measure on the general election ballot."
The measure, he continued, would be "a down payment toward the many transit and highway improvements this county needs to support our economy, our environment, the needs of the transit-dependent and an overall high quality of life for the people we represent.
"The people of Los Angeles County should have the right to decide for themselves whether they want to invest in their future," the mayor concluded.
Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, who oversees county elections, told supervisors that a different type of ballot might have to be used for a separate sales tax measure because vote-counting machines might not be able to handle two elections simultaneously.
Many politicians, including Yaroslavsky and Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke, have hailed the sales tax increase as the county's best shot at getting a pot of money that would be controlled locally. Budget woes, the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made it all but impossible to obtain state or federal money of that magnitude.
And backers of the measure argue that a sales tax hike is the surest way to build costly projects such as the subway, a Gold Line extension to Azusa, the Expo Line, a busway or light rail along Crenshaw Boulevard and other projects.
But with the prospect of $30 billion to $40 billion in revenue, local, state and federal elected officials have been scurrying to insert language into the authorizing legislation to ensure that their pet projects get moved to the front of the line.
During Tuesday's meeting, three supervisors complained that the MTA's spending plan still didn't fairly distribute the money throughout the county.
Molina said the plan was a scheme to "get more for one side of town versus the other side." She later added: "It's a very funny way this little choo-choo is getting on the ballot."
Antonovich said the money should be split up on a per capita basis and complained that sales tax revenue for some projects -- such as $1 billion earmarked for mass transit along the 405 Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass -- would probably be diverted to pay for the more costly subway.
