Monday, October 13, 2003

LOS ANGELES — The mechanics who service most of the bus and rail lines in and around Los Angeles (search) planned to strike Tuesday, an action that would affect hundreds of thousands of commuters.

"We're going on strike," Neil Silver, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (search), said Monday. The decision was made a day earlier, after negotiations between the union and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (search) broke off with "absolutely no progress" despite a state mediator, Silver said.

"This is a great tragedy for the people of the county of Los Angeles, the people who depend on public transportation to get to work, to get to school," Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said.

The walkout by about 2,500 MTA employees was scheduled to start at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday against the nation's third-largest transit system. The MTA operates 1,900 buses, as well light-rail and subway lines, carrying about 500,000 riders a day.

The parties are at odds over the mechanics union's health fund, which is in dire financial shape.

Union officials earlier said that bus drivers and train operators would honor the picket lines. The strike would shut down the countywide transit system for the second time in three years.

A walkout by bus drivers in 2000 shut down the transit agency's bus, subway and light-rail service for 32 days, forcing approximately 400,000 riders to scramble for other ways to get to and from work.

Some 9,000 union workers could potentially honor the strike, MTA spokesman Marc Littman said. Sixteen other municipal bus lines in the region were expected to operate normally, as were Metrolink commuter trains.

The transit agency said an independent audit found the union mismanaged the health trust fund. The MTA also is seeking increased contributions from mechanics for the fund.

The union wants greater contributions from the MTA to cope with soaring medical costs. The MTA pays nearly $17 million every year into the fund, which is administered by the union and pays for medical coverage for 2,000 employees and retirees.

"Union leaders basically ran the trust fund into the ground and now they want the taxpayers to bail them out," transit authority CEO Roger Snoble said.