Choice for MTA Job Still Hasn’t Accepted

A week after being offered the top transit job in Los Angeles County, Mayor Richard Riordan’s choice to head the Metropolitan Transportation Authority still is undecided about whether to accept it, officials said Thursday.

Theodore “Tad” Weigle Jr. met with four of the five county supervisors Thursday morning in Washington, D.C., and, according to one participant, Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, “indicated that he was not interested, but he was willing to continue to talk with us.”

Burke also said that she did not stay for the entire two-hour meeting and was uncertain about the transit executive’s plans.

But an aide to Riordan, who recruited Weigle and spoke by phone with him later in the day, said, “The mayor remains optimistic that Tad Weigle will come to Los Angeles. . . . He still wants to be considered.”

Weigle did not return calls seeking comment.

A spokesman for the engineering company Bechtel Corp.--for which Weigle supervises construction of the Athens subway--said the executive has “assured us he intends to remain at Bechtel.”

But others suggested that Weigle’s comments Thursday were a negotiating ploy, and that if he was no longer interested in the job, he would not have spent two hours meeting with the county supervisors, who also serve on the MTA board.

A source said Weigle, a former transit executive in Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C., has been turned off by the media attention and the “clear violation of confidentiality” in the process that led to his selection by the MTA board. Another source said Weigle was concerned about division on the board over its decision to open negotiations with him.

MTA Board Chairman Larry Zarian was left confused Thursday.

“I am getting mixed signals,” he said, adding that he had been unable to reach either Riordan or Weigle.

MTA board members have lamented the difficulty of filling the chief executive officer’s job at the giant agency, which has become nationally known for its missteps on the $5.9-billion Los Angeles subway, the West’s biggest public works project.

The MTA is seeking the third chief executive officer in its four-year history.