Fifth in a series
Re “Selling the Old RTD on a New Way of Life”
[img]989|left|Denny Zane||no_popup[/img][Editor’s Note: For more than 30 years, Denny Zane, 63-year-old visionary-philosopher-politician-arch activist in Santa Monica, has been in the forefront of shaping and influencing public policy and environment-related projects. This is a first-person account of that journey. Summing up the way he has morphed through a series of (always-linked) career changes, he said: “I got into the habit of making a living by pursuing my personal political priorities.” Now concerned with mass transportation, accent on light rail, his address is movela.com]
The case for RTD busses using natural gas instead of diesel was compelling, but the problem was the cost of natural gas technology was significantly greater although there were small amounts of funding that would bring down those costs.
Nevertheless, Antonio Villaraigosa, who was a member of County Supervisor Gloria Molina’s staff, really championed the Operations Committee urging the full RTD board to make the next purchase natural gas for the busses.
The full 13-member board followed the recommendations of Antonio, now the Mayor of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre. Remember this about the Operations staff people: Their maintenance staff would need new training, and they would have to start outfitting for compressed natural gas fueling stations and technology, which was also more costly. For those reasons, there was a lot of opposition from the Operations staff.
But it was really Antonio who championed this. From that day forward to this, the RTD/L.A. Metro bus system has transitioned to natural gas, and they have not purchased diesel technology. The person who made it happen was Antonio. That was my first collaboration with Antonio, the first time I met him. I was leading the community organization, the Coalition for Clean Air, pushing that effort.
Two weeks ago, I received photographs from Cindy Horn showing all of us at a press conference, in ’93 or ’94, when the RTD was getting a bad rap for all sorts of stuff. We were trying to find a way to say thank you to Metro or the RTD, whichever it was then. We convinced the company that had the signage contract for the side of the busses to allow us to have a signage program they would design that would say thank-you at no cost. The company that had the advertising concession on the side of the busses donated the space.
For a period of weeks, a significant number of busses drove around L.A. with a banner that said “Thank You, Metro, for Thinking About Clean Air.” It looked as if it had been drawn with kids’ crayons. So the photograph Cindy sent showed Antonio, me and a whole bunch of kids saying thank you to Metro.
Interestingly, other organizations subsequently have claimed credit for creating the Metro natural gas commitment. But it was really the Coalition for Clean Air and Antonio, thanks to prodding from Cindy Horn.
My second collaboration with Antonio was a little later when he was Speaker of the state Assembly. The California Truck Working Group that I was working with and the late Carl Moyer brought to him legislation he co-authored that put a significant amount of new state money into subsidies for alternatives to diesel. In addition, crucial political support from the trucking association in the last days of the Clinton administration led the President to adopt new clean truck standards.
That was a collaboration on diesel technology that Antonio and I began in ’94, and the sequence of steps led to dramatic improvements not only in California but as a new national standard. To this day, not only is every Metro bus on natural gas, virtually every other fleet in the Air Basin is on natural gas. Some, like Santa Monica, are LNG, liquefied natural gas.
(To be continued)
