A Golden Finish For The Gold Line
By Congressman Adam Schiff
Published in the Pasadena Star News, December 2, 2002
With construction of the Gold Line light rail project from downtown
Los Angeles to Pasadena nearing completion next summer -- when it will open to a
projected 30,000 daily riders -- we must now turn our efforts toward extending the
line the full 40 miles to the Los Angeles County line in Claremont.
After the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority
threatened to pull the plug on the Gold Line five years ago, I authored state
legislation creating a single-purpose construction authority charged with taking
on and completing the job of building the 13.7-mile line from downtown Los Angeles
to East Pasadena. The construction authority has proven to be a model of efficiency
in delivering the project on time and on budget. With Phase 1 of the project
progressing toward completion, the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments and
the construction authority have joined forces to start preliminary work on Phase
2 of the Gold Line along 24 miles of existing railway right-of-way through the
Cities of Arcadia, Monrovia, Duarte, Irwindale, Azusa, Glendora, San Dimas, La
Verne, Pomona and Claremont.
Regional transportation priorities can and should transcend party or
ideological differences. My bill authorizing the new construction authority won
strong bipartisan support in Sacramento, and the San Gabriel Valley cities have
once again united behind the effort to extend the Gold Line. In Washington, D.C.,
David Dreier and I, and the entire bipartisan San Gabriel Valley Congressional
delegation will be working together to secure federal funding for the Gold Line as
well as for the Alameda Corridor East project, which will ease rail transport of
Pacific Rim trade through the San Gabriel Valley and beyond. Since we will be
competing with other regions across the nation for transportation resources, we
will need to make a vigorous effort to ensure our region receives its fair share
of federal support.
The stakes are high. In addition to strong economic benefits to our
community, the Gold Line will play a key role as we strive to reduce congestion and
meet clean air goals, so important to the health of all residents and especially to
seniors and children who are most vulnerable to air pollution. While Phase 1 of the
Gold Line was largely funded through local and state revenues, Phase 2 will expand
its focus and look also to federal sources for funding for design, planning and
construction.
Federal support for the Gold Line dovetails well with the Congressional
policy shift in the last decade of encouraging transit alternatives in an effort to
fight air pollution. Beginning in the 1950s, most federal transportation funding
was spent on roads and the interstate highway network. By the 1990s, Congress sought
to increase transportation choices by allocating more funding toward buses, light
rail, trains, vanpools, bicycle paths and other alternative modes of transportation.
Today, although much federal funding still goes toward bridge, highway and road
construction and repair, the trend toward providing greater flexibility in transportation
choices has strengthened, and, I hope, will continue to grow as Congress next year
debates the reauthorization of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21).
Completing the Gold Line -- not just to Pasadena but also all the
way to Claremont -- is my top mass transit priority. A completed Gold Line will
build on the successes of Phase 1 to Pasadena, and deliver powerful and lasting
benefits to the San Gabriel Valley. Perhaps most importantly, after the enormous
cost overruns that plagued construction of our subway system, the Gold Line will
demonstrate to the State of California and to the federal government that rail in
Los Angeles can be built cost effectively. The Gold Line will be mass transit success
story that will help re-energize rail-building projects so desperately needed to
combat congestion, clean the air, spur new growth patterns and provide cost-efficient,
inexpensive transportation to all.
It was four years ago that we celebrated the signing into law of the
legislation creating the construction authority that is completing the Gold Line. In
an opinion column that I authored at the time for this newspaper, I wrote that the
construction authority would enjoy success if the politicians kept their hands out
of the contracting process, if the authority itself resisted the tendency to become
a bloated bureaucracy and instead remained a low-overhead, streamlined organization,
and if innovative design-build procedures were employed to keep contractor costs in
line. I am proud to say that the Gold Line construction authority has fulfilled the
promise inherent in its creation. As our region moves forward on Phase 2, we must
make sure that those promises - of new efficiencies in public works contracting,
of an agile, compact and focused professional staff, and a vigorous but not meddlesome
or cumbersome governance board - are upheld. The people of our region deserve nothing
less.
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