Pasadena’s voting rights trial resurrects issue of bus service
In an effort to convince a federal judge that Pasadena’s new City Council election system is discriminatory, civil rights lawyers effectively put the city government on trial.
Attorneys for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund questioned city officials about the distribution of funds for setting up neighborhood associations and for capital improvements like streets and drainage. They also elicited testimony about Pasadena’s decision in 2012 to end its bus service, leaving the city of 150,000 residents with no mass transit.
The purpose of the bus service testimony, lead plaintiffs’ attorney Nina Perales told me, was to provide another example of the council’s split on contentious issues between members representing the mostly Latino (and lower income) north side and those from the predominantly Anglo south side.
The south side bloc, aligned with Mayor Johnny Isbell, usually prevailed. Witnesses testified that fear of losing his slim majority prompted Isbell to push for a charter change creating a system of six district and two at-large council positions, replacing an all-district structure. Isbell says the new system gives residents better representation.
As I noted in a previous column, these political machinations had real-life consequences. The loss of the bus service was one of them. More than four years later, its effects linger.
In news accounts at the time, officials said the city ended its agreement with Harris County Transit because ridership was too low to justify the cost. (Monthly boardings peaked at about 4,100 in February 2012, and the city’s share of the cost that year was estimated at $226,000.) Officials stuck with that response when they testified in the trial last week.
“The city was questioning the economic benefit of that program because the ridership was so low,” Andy Helms, director of financial planning, testified. “It just didn’t seem to make sense economically.”
Virtually no transit system makes sense economically, if that requires being selfsupporting through fares. The idea is that public transporta-
tion benefits the whole community and is worthy of government support, even through taxes paid by those who don’t use it. We don’t exempt people without school-age children from paying property taxes that fund public schools, after all.
Harris County Transit operated in Pasadena, which doesn’t participate in Metro or pay its 1-cent sales tax, from January 2010 to October 2012. The death knell came when the council voted 5-3 to accept the report of a committee of two council members who reviewed cost and ridership figures and concluded the service wasn’t worth continuing.
The committee’s report includes this curious sentence, which I read several times without achieving comprehension: “Ridership will increase at a decreasing rate; therefore generating an increased cost per rider.” This could not possibly be true unless costs rose through an expansion of service, which no one was proposing.
James Llamas, a senior associate at the Houston consulting firm Traffic Engineers Inc., said 4,100 boardings a month is “very respectable” for a service that operated only 11 hours each weekday. “In the Metro system that would be considered a successful coverage route and it would never be
considered for elimination,” Llamas said via email. (In transit terms, coverage routes are those that meet a need but don’t necessarily generate high ridership.)
Hundreds of people turned out for a public hearing in August 2012 to plead for continuation of the service, saying they depended on the buses to
get to their jobs or to make other vital trips. U.S. Rep. Gene Green, a Democrat whose district includes Pasadena, wrote a letter asking the city to reconsider its decision.
The outcome of the voting rights lawsuit is uncertain, as U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal considers the evidence she heard during the non-jury trial. But whichever way it goes, Pasadena officials could reconsider a decision that seems to have been based on flimsy evidence at best.
Isbell, 78, cannot run for re-election next year due to term limits. If he is concerned about his legacy, he might consider the effect of a gesture that would improve the daily lives of a lot of his constituents.