Facing a Rough Ride : New MTA Chief Steps Aboard to Merge Longtime Rival Agencies

ALBANY, N.Y. — In his last 8:30 a.m. staff meeting before coming to Los Angeles to head the behemoth local transit agency, New York State Transportation Commissioner Franklin E. White was still trying to get to the heart of the matter.

Slicing through a sea of reports on potholes, high-speed trains and the virtues of one-person snowplow staffs--all densely littered with acronyms and jargon--White tossed out piercing questions: What does this really mean? What are the consequences? Who’s pushing this?

The questions are vintage Franklin White. He is a 51-year-old, detail-oriented career bureaucrat nicknamed “Mr. Good Government” by his Albany colleagues. He believes government agencies should be run with the rigorous accountability of a private business. No fat. No slack. And a lot of questions.

In Gov. Mario Cuomo’s Administration, where commissioners fall like molted feathers, White was one of the longest lasting, holding his post for eight years. He supervised an annual budget of $4.3 billion and 11,500 employees. He modernized a department long accustomed to antiquated engineering and management practices. He oversaw the rebuilding of a rapidly deteriorating tapestry of 16,000 miles of roads and 8,500 bridges when politicians were far more interested in cutting ribbons on new projects than in spending money to replace the old.

But in Los Angeles, where he took charge of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority last week, the challenges are almost certain to be tougher.

White will orchestrate the merger of two transit agencies that historically have been archrivals: the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and the Southern California Rapid Transit District. Instead of one temperamental boss, he faces the 13 MTA board members--each with a potentially competing agenda. He inherits a 30-year, $183-billion plan for the region’s transportation network without enough funding to transform the blueprint into reality. And finally, White--known as a bridges-and-highways man--will grapple with developing public transit in Los Angeles when ridership nationwide is dwindling.

“I bet you are thinking, ‘Why in God’s name would anybody take the job?’ ” White said. “The answer is that it’s one of the most exciting public works opportunities in the country and I’m excited as hell about it.”

Working for the Los Angeles agency that has been dubbed the biggest checkbook in town, White will oversee the creation of a 400-mile transportation network in a region renowned for gridlock. As chief of the MTA, White will earn $175,000 (almost double his New York salary of $98,399) and direct 9,500 employees with a budget of about $3.1 billion.

Because of the political turmoil surrounding the merger and uncertainty over the direction of the new agency’s 13-member board, many in the transit world view the MTA’s top job as being fraught with pitfalls. And some question whether White has sufficient background in mass transit to overcome the obstacles.

“He’s untested in running a big operation like that where you are not only running an operation but managing a building program,” one New York transportation official said. “It is viewed as a tough job. Tough in the sense that some people are concerned whether the (MTA) board really wanted to empower the CEO with sufficient authority.”

Others, however, predict that White will flourish in his new position.

“If I were a betting man, and I am, I’d bet that Frank will be successful,” said Peter Stangl, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York City. “Frank thinks well strategically. He’ll do well with the re-examination of priorities.”

New York Lt. Gov. Stan Lundine credited White with being instrumental in the 1988 approval by voters of a $3.1-billion transportation bond. “A big factor was Frank’s leadership and people’s confidence that the money would be spent wisely,” he said.

Several controversies already await White. First, he will have to establish a structure for merging the Transportation Commission and the RTD, combining departments and determining where there is duplication. Although MTA board members have been coy about addressing the question of staff layoffs, White is not.

“There is no question there are going to be fewer employees and financial savings as a result of the merger,” he said.

To resolve the bickering that has been the hallmark of the two agencies, White plans to put his top deputies under one roof. “My goal is to get the executives together as quickly as possible--once you have the key managers co-located, we’ll break the back of this thing,” he said. At the same time, White declined to say whether he would move to halt negotiations with developer Ray Watt over construction of a second transportation headquarters.

Although the RTD had already begun construction of a headquarters at Union Station, the Transportation Commission was preparing to build a separate facility for itself. Critics charged that the plan was a waste of taxpayer money at a time when the two agencies were merging into one.

White also said he intends to re-examine the 30-year plan, drawn up largely by Transportation Commission Executive Director Neil Peterson, who is leaving the agency after losing in his bid for the top job. Colleagues who have worked with White say he will tackle the tasks before him in a methodical, systematic fashion. An unflappable and patient man, White rarely gets angry.

In a recent New York newspaper cartoon, White is sketched with a paunch, looking like Thurgood Marshall clutching a briefcase. White--a tall, slender, elegantly dressed man--looks nothing like the legendary Supreme Court justice, except for the fact that both are black.

After the newspaper hit the stands, the editor phoned White to apologize. The cartoonist had never seen White, the editor offered as a means of explanation.

White--who as a student brought Malcolm X to speak at his college and picketed Woolworth’s for its discriminatory policies during the 1960s--thought the cartoon was funny. He wrote to the artist and asked for the original.

“Some people think it’s an indication of invisibility when you get portrayed that way. But that’s a bit heavy for me,” White said. “Discrimination is a norm in our society. Having said that, it’s also true that over the years, I’ve been successful.”

The son of a Jamaican dock laborer who earned no more than $5,000 a year, White was the fifth child in a family of three boys and four girls. By age 5, Franklin White, a bright, talkative boy, had already announced that he wanted to become a lawyer.

Hoping to take advantage of educational opportunities in the United States, his parents moved from the tiny island to the Bronx in New York City. White was 12. Not until three years later did his parents save enough money to take their family on an outing outside their working-class neighborhood.

White had always figured that he would become a tax attorney, graduating with a law degree from Columbia University and a business administration degree from New York’s City College. But in the mid-’60s, because of his legal background, White was quickly enveloped in what he considered a more urgent calling: civil rights.

For 10 years, he worked as a lawyer for a variety of organizations, including the Department of Justice, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the New York City Human Rights Commission. But in 1975, White landed a job as deputy director of the New York State Division of Budget. That job gave him a grounding in the nuts and bolts of government.

From there he was appointed as a domestic policy official during the Jimmy Carter Administration, overseeing Justice Department issues. When Virginia’s Gov. Charles S. Robb first spoke to White about a position in his Cabinet, he intended it to be secretary of public safety. But because of a reshuffling of the Cabinet, White became the secretary of transportation and public safety.

“That was my first entry into transportation,” White said.

When White arrived in Albany in 1985, his efforts to streamline the bureaucracy, especially in the beginning, were viewed with great skepticism by a department that had seen commissioners come and go.

Managers in regional offices were given the authority to carry out projects without always running to Albany for approval. For the first time, the commissioner met regularly with road workers and secretaries to find out how they felt about their work and how it could be improved. White was slowly transforming the department, a place where people looked forward to change with as much eagerness as a visit to the dentist.

“Around here, change is not a popular word,” said Luz Allende, the department’s assistant commissioner of personnel. “But he really challenged people to change without hitting them over the head.”

White, who describes himself as traditional, opens doors for female employees and hates to let a woman to pick up the tab at a restaurant. And he quickly sought to alert the 12 regional offices across the state that sexist behavior would not be tolerated.

It was a tough message to get across but White took quick action, as he did in an incident in which two female employees successfully sued a laborer over sexual harassment. In a unique legal maneuver, he had the department sue the laborer for recovery of $30,000 it had paid in settlements to the two women. Litigation is still pending.

“It was one of the few times I’ve seen him angry,” Allende said. “He said we as taxpayers don’t need to take that and that he wanted the money back.”

White, colleagues say, tried to instill a frugal sensibility in his staff. He encouraged all of his employees to come up with cost-cutting measures. Reducing two-person snowplow teams to one, for instance, saved $4 million last year, said Don Geoffry, a former assistant commissioner for operations who left the department in December after 31 years.

“He was very fiscally austere, almost to the point where he was too fiscally austere. We would go to him with a proposal that we thought was pretty good and he’d try to squeeze another nickel out of it,” Geoffry said.

For all his talk about fiscal bottom lines, White cares deeply about his staff, associates say.

Three months after he started in Albany, White hired a management and finance expert from Chicago. He and White worked closely together and their wives became friends. When White received the call that his colleague had died in heart surgery, he wept.

For White, who takes pride in being in control, the memory of tears is an embarrassing one. “We were brand-new in an agency that wasn’t accustomed to change and that has shrugged off major changes,” he said. “Here you are in a new environment, you bring in somebody, you get to know and like them as a person. . . .”

His eyes filled with tears “It was a hit; it was heavy,” he said, “I don’t cry.”