Pasadena mayor is working to bring back bus service to city
Jeff Wagner took the oath of office as Pasadena’s mayor July 1. In a sense, though, it was just this week that he truly emerged as an independent leader.
The moment came not in a rousing speech, but in a news release distributed via email. It landed in my inbox at 9:51 a.m. Wednesday.
“Pasadena mayor plans to bring bus service back to the city,” the headline says. City officials, according to the announcement, are working out details of a plan to resume — and to improve on — the service provided by Harris County Transit from 2010 to 2012.
The decision is important for practical and symbolic reasons.
Resuming bus service will help thousands of Pasadena residents get to jobs, medical appointments and other destinations. It will provide mobility to those without cars and an alternative to others who may find the modest fare ($1 for a single ride) easier on their budgets than paying for gasoline, insurance and maintenance.
But Wagner’s decision also represents a policy break from his predecessor, Johnny Isbell, who’d served as mayor on and off since 1981 but couldn’t seek re-election this year because of term limits. The City Council voted 5 to 3 in October 2012 to end the service, but the council was following the lead of Isbell’s administration.
“The ridership wasn’t worth anything,” Roy Mease, who headed the city’s economic development agency, said at the time. “The program wasn’t justified for the money being spent.”
The 600 people who signed a petition asking the city to maintain the service no doubt saw it differently. No transit agency recovers its full costs through fares; buses are a public service, like schools or law enforcement.
Within days of
Wagner’s inauguration, the new administration began discussions with Harris County Transit, a division of the county’s economic development department that now provides bus service in Baytown.
Baytown and Pasadena were among the Harris County cities that opted out of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s service area and thus don’t pay Metro’s 1-cent sales tax.
Bus service ‘welcome’
Many of the workingclass residents of Pasadena’s mostly Latino north side — the people most likely to benefit from bus service — might not have voted for Wagner.
His decision to restore the service shows he is reaching out beyond his base on the city’s more affluent, predominantly Anglo south side.
Some of these southside voters, in fact, are probably leery of bus service — believing, like some of those who responded to my recent column on the FM 1960 area, that buses may attract criminals and vagrants.
But in this case, at least, those voices didn’t prevail.
Latino activist Cesar Espinosa, who led protests at City Hall on the day of Wagner’s inauguration, told me the decision to restore bus service was encouraging — but only as a first step. A trial over a lawsuit challenging a change in the City Council structure portrayed Pasadena’s leaders as hostile to Latino interests, and repairing that damage will be one of Wagner’s greatest challenges.
“We know that there has been a need for bus service, and this is obviously something that’s welcome,” said Espinosa, the executive director of FIEL Houston. “But really, it’s something the city
should already have been doing.”
Wagner has also named two Latinos to top city posts, tapping ex-Houston City Council member James Rodriguez as chief of staff and Pasadena Police Department veteran Al Espinoza as police chief.
Mayor ‘collaborative’
So far, though, Wagner hasn’t shown much interest in engaging with the reporters who cover him.
Shortly after his runoff victory in July, he told me he would sit for an interview after he was sworn in. I’m still waiting.
Wagner may have grown accustomed to delegating media inquiries to press aides during his 30 years as a Houston police officer. But talking to reporters is part of the job of an elected official — particularly the mayor of a city of 150,000 with a strong-mayor form of government.
City Councilman Cody Ray Wheeler, a Latino who was part of a group that consistently opposed Isbell on contentious issues, told me this week that he remains optimistic about the new administration — even though Wagner, as a councilman, usually sided with Isbell.
Wheeler said the bus service decision was encouraging. He also mentioned the recent announcement of planned improvements to Richey Street on the city’s north side — a project that had languished under Isbell.
But the biggest difference, Wheeler said, is that the new mayor is far more collaborative than his predecessor.
“He doesn’t have his boot heels dug in on everything,” Wheeler said. “I understand we’re not going to get everything we want, but we’re working together.”