If you've been having a hard time following the murky political melodramas over the proposed half-cent county sales tax increase to fund more public transportation, you shouldn't blame yourself. You've probably been making the naive citizen's basic mistake of considering the question on its merits.
Silly you.
None of this is really about alleviating the ever-worsening traffic that is strangling the region's economic growth and rendering daily life unlivable. Nor is it about whether it's a good idea to raise the most regressive tax government can impose in order to construct an extension of the subway down Wilshire Boulevard from Western Avenue to the sea, or build a light-rail line along Exposition Boulevard to Santa Monica, or start any of the other crucial projects the Metropolitan Transportation Authority proposes to fund with this levy.
No, this whole backroom knife fight is about the things that really count in our dysfunctional local politics: outdated but reflexive geographic animosities -- Eastside versus Westside, San Gabriel Valley versus city of L.A. -- and petty personal feuds between and among politicians.
The animosity starts on the county Board of Supervisors. Despite the fact that the MTA board decisively voted to attach a specific set of projects -- such as the subway to the sea -- to the ballot proposition authorizing the sales tax hike, Eastside and San Gabriel Valley lawmakers, notably Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Gloria Molina and a raft of small-city mayors, still are waging a guerrilla war on behalf of their pet projects. They're opposing the tax measure, rallying under the banner of equity, but is there any justice in their case?
Antonovich and Molina have found a novel way of framing the issue, arguing that transit dollars ought to be allocated on a roughly per capita basis rather than to specific projects. It's a superficially appealing idea, but they also want to exclude from that calculation the billions of dollars that already have been spent to improve the movement of goods -- and not incidentally relieve surface street congestion -- out of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, along the Alameda Corridor and its feeder rail lines, and through the San Gabriel Valley.
