MTC sued for discrimination over funding patterns

The plaintiffs, represented by attorneys including the federal government's chief civil rights lawyer during the Clinton administration's later years, say Caltrain's ridership is 60 percent white and that the agency gets a $13.79 federal and state subsidy per rider. BART's ridership is about 43 percent white, with a $6.14 subsidy per rider.

But AC Transit, with a ridership only about 21 percent white, gets a per-rider subsidy of only $2.78, they say, based on data for 1989 through 2003 from the National Transit Database.

"There's a separate but unequal transit system," said attorney Bill Lann Lee, paraphrasing the "separate but equal" racial segregation doctrine struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1955.

This is no accident, Lee said, accusing the MTC of investing billions in expanding rail services for predominately white suburbs while denying money to bus projects serving minority-heavy inner cities.

The MTC — the nine-county Bay Area's transportation planning, financing and coordinating agency, which funnels state and federal money to local transit agencies — declined to comment Tuesday.

Lee was the U.S. Justice Department's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights from 1997 through 2001. Earlier, he was a civil rights attorney in Los Angeles who helped file a 1994 class-action civil rights lawsuit similar to this one. That case resulted in a 1996 consent decree forcing the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority to improve the city's bus system and make the bus system and transit-dependent riders its top funding priority.

Plaintiff Sylvia Darensburg, 45, said she's a mother of three teenagers who lives in East Oakland, works as an administrative assistant in downtown Oakland and is pursuing a biology degree at Chabot College in Hayward. She relies on AC Transit, yet must wait hours and change buses often to get where she's going as fares continue to rise.

She doesn't want any elaborate improvements to AC Transit, she said — simply enough funding "just to function adequately."

The case's other named plaintiffs are Virginia Martinez, a Richmond mother of four whose family relies on AC Transit to get to school, work, shopping, church and leisure; Vivian Hain, an East Oakland mother of three whose household's car only works a few weeks per month; Communities for a Better Environment, a nonprofit environmental health and justice group; and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192, comprised mostly of AC Transit drivers, mechanics and other workers.

The lawsuit says a longstanding pattern of race discrimination by the MTC exists, violating the plaintiffs' equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment as well as federal and state civil rights laws.

Contact Josh Richman at jrichman@angnewspapers.com.