COLUMN ONE : The Man Who Loves the RTD : Board President Nick Patsaouras works hard promoting ridership and gives pep talks to the staff. Some observers see him as an opportunist who has designs on mayor’s office.

It was 5:30 a.m. and still dark at the RTD bus yard in West Hollywood, but it wasn’t too early for Nick Patsaouras to grab a microphone and rattle off a few inspirational words to the mechanics and bus drivers drifting in for the sunrise shift.

“I believe we are on the right road to make this system the best bus operating company in the nation,” Patsaouras gushed, bus engines rumbling in the background. “I feel so good. . . . People come and tell me the buses are clean. The buses are on time. The drivers are courteous.”

The rap-like chant of praise was part of his unrelenting one-man campaign to restore the reputation of one of the region’s more beleaguered agencies--the Southern California Rapid Transit District. In the past decade, the nation’s third largest public transit system has been criticized for everything from lousy bus service to general mismanagement to employing drug abusers as drivers. Along the way, RTD has lost riders, territory and funding.

In the eight months since he muscled his way into the RTD board presidency, Patsaouras has eschewed the traditional role of benign, almost invisible overseer and--with press conference upon press conference, promotion upon promotion--sought to revive the RTD and establish himself as a power in the wider world of regional transportation.

The willful, 47-year-old immigrant Greek has recorded his own radio ads in Spanish, launched programs to gain rider goodwill and delved into the minutiae of daily bus operations--displaying impressive energy, brashness, a dash of naivete and ego and, many say, ill-concealed political ambitions.

Clearly, transportation is an inviting political issue. A poll conducted last year by the Southern California Assn. of Governments found the public to be nearly as concerned about clogged freeways as with gang killings.

“Crime 61% and traffic 59%,” Patsaouras muses as he steers through bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic in his powder blue Mercedes two-seater with the “NIKOS--P” license plate.

A wealthy businessman and longtime RTD director, Nikolas Patsaouras is a good-looking man with carefully cut salt-and-pepper hair, a strong, expressive face and a honey-colored tan. His arms and hands rarely rest when he speaks. They jab, cut and silently implore, partners in persuasion.

On this day he is out visiting bus divisions as part of his effort to rally the “troops,” as he is prone to call the men and women who drive and maintain a 2,600-bus fleet for the system, which stretches across Los Angeles County.

From downtown Los Angeles to the dusty reaches of Pomona, Patsaouras visited every bus division in the district last fall, delivering fatherly pep talks. “A little stir of the pot to get things going,” he explains.

He leaves his expensively cut suit jacket in his car, rolls up his shirt sleeves and heads for the bus bay or the lounge, where off-duty drivers shoot boisterous pool games and watch television soap operas.

“I’m here to tell you that we do care downtown,” he proclaims to a clutch of drivers during one bus barn visit. “I’m convinced the majority of you are good employees, hard working, dedicated to your company. And somehow the last three years gotten beaten up.”

His thickly accented remarks leap from thought to thought like a zigzagging bus route. Cliches abound.

The drivers stare at him. They are a no-nonsense bunch, people who jockey 27,000-pound buses around the streets of Los Angeles. People who carry around kooks and thugs and do 2 a.m. runs down deserted boulevards. One has a Mohawk haircut, sunglasses and a fat cigar in his hand. Another glistens with gold chains.

“You talk of passenger-customer respect,” a driver snaps. “I think we as drivers--if we could get some respect out of downtown first--we the drivers are not respected.”

Patsaouras replies soothingly. “That’s one of the problems, communication. . . . We don’t tell you we love you.”

“Excuse me, excuse me,” chimes in a woman considerably larger than Patsaouras, waving her dagger-like fingernails in the air. “I have a comment about transit police. Personally, I feel they’re a big joke.”

One transit police horror story tumbles out after another. It sounds like a chaotic bar scene. Patsaouras raises his hands in a vain attempt at quiet.

“You have to see them as your brothers and sisters,” he preaches. “Instead of saying, ‘To hell with them, they are no good,’ think of how you react to your brothers and sisters, how can I help them?”

Finally the session is over. Back in his car, Patsaouras is subdued, looking a little punished. “I feel good,” he declares unconvincingly. “I truly believe the fact that they vented their complaints makes them feel good. It’s like a therapy session.”

The vast transit agency of 9,000 employees could use a little therapy.

With rising fares, annual ridership has fallen steadily in recent years, from a peak of 497 million in 1985 to 401 million last year. Dissatisfied with RTD’s service, politicians have chipped away at its territory, creating a fledgling transit agency that has taken over a number of San Gabriel Valley routes. More proposals loom to snatch lines in other parts of Los Angeles County.

Funding has declined. In 1986 and 1987, the agency was whipped by reports alleging mismanagement, bus driver drug use, absenteeism and loose spending controls. Facing vexing cost overruns on the first phase of the Los Angeles Metro Rail, RTD a year ago relinquished much of its authority to design and build the massive subway project.

Some experts predict that the oft-maligned agency eventually will fade out of independent existence and wind up as the operational child of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission--the funding authority that only recently patched up a long-running feud with the RTD.

No, Patsaouras insists.

“We have turned it around,” he declares. “If your army is demoralized, it’s a matter of time (until) you lose. What I have been able to do is tell them, ‘You are good,’ and help them flex their muscles. . . . I don’t pretend to be a transportation expert. But I know how to get the troops rallied up. And I have done that. They feel good.”

Why, after nine years on the board, including two as president in the mid-’80s, did Patsaouras suddenly emerge as RTD’s chief standard-bearer?

“He’s running for mayor, plain and simple,” scoffed a former RTD board member. “He’s playing for the crowd.”

According to this school of thought, Patsaouras is a publicity-mad opportunist who has seized on the board presidency to promote his undeclared political ambitions, adopting a crusade that is more gimmick than substance.

Indeed, Patsaouras has not always been so enthusiastic a champion of RTD. In the past, he has supported some of the very moves that have gnawed away at the district. He lobbied hard to get RTD out of the construction business and to give the contract for policing the new Blue Line light-rail system to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, rather than the district police. He also supported relinquishing the San Gabriel routes and has said that RTD will give up lines in the San Fernando Valley if necessary.

“He was more or less critical of everything the RTD did at one time,” said Earl Clark, who heads the nearly 5,000-member RTD drivers’ union and now supports Patsaouras. “I got the feeling he was carrying the sword for the (county transportation) commission. I think he had an awakening of some sort.”

Patsaouras is coy when asked about his political ambitions. He does say that he has been on the RTD board a long time and doesn’t want to stay much longer. “I would say a year, plus or minus. . . . Nick has so much to offer and it’s limited and then you need somebody else.”

He insists that in the past he wasn’t picking on the RTD, he was trying to make it better. And when you’re not president, you don’t have the bully pulpit--the staff won’t even set up a press conference for you.

He no longer has that problem. Last fall Patsaouras was calling press conferences at least once a week, about five times the rate of his predecessor, Gordana Swanson.

The publicity blitzkrieg sparked its share of jokes at RTD, but board members also have breathed a sigh of relief that Patsaouras is managing to get good press after years of nasty headlines about the agency.

“I think Nick has been very good for the district,” said one of Patsaouras’ allies on the board, Jeff Jenkins. “(He’s) boosting morale and instilling some confidence.”

Patsaouras sits at the head of a long table, the agency’s executive staff arrayed before him. He pulls scribbled notes from a handsome black satchel. One by one, he goes over them. How come this division can’t get parts? How come, when a driver calls up and says his bus has a flat tire, the dispatcher asks him how he knows the tire is flat--”true story,” Patsaouras stresses.

He checks to see what’s been done about the problems he raised at the last meeting. The new transit police chief has gone to talk to disgruntled drivers. Long-requested furniture has been ordered. A night security guard has been stationed at a dangerous downtown parking lot for drivers.

Of course there is the cheerleading speech. “I feel like a butler who has uncorked a good bottle of wine and let it breathe and let the public drink,” Patsaouras coos, undoubtedly the first ever to compare RTD with fine wine.

His relentless boosterism has endeared him to the marketing department. “To Nick Patsaouras, who’s now the “p” in PR,” proclaims a plaque from the marketing staff, listing promotions Patsaouras has embraced since becoming board president: A transit riders’ Bill of Rights, public tours of RTD facilities--”L.A.’s Newest Attraction”--patriotic ads to save oil and ride the bus, and his 6-month-old program offering a free ride to passengers whose bus is more than 15 minutes late.

He pushed through the free rides over the reservations of the RTD staff and the drivers--who were concerned that the program would cost the agency hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in lost fares, as well as endless hassles for the drivers. But only about $60,000 in free fares were given away the first month, and the drivers decided they liked the effort.

Patsaouras can’t stop talking about it. “You know what you hear all the time about RTD, ‘Oh, you can’t depend on RTD.’ We broke that myth,” he trumpeted before a firing line of television cameras at one of his press briefings. “The proof is in the pudding. Hard numbers.”

Maybe. “This silly advertisement and this man making all these wonderful claims about himself,” pooh-poohed Michael Perrott, an RTD passenger who says there aren’t that many free rides because the drivers won’t give them. “If you don’t want to pay, they almost take it personally. It’s an insult to their manhood.”

Still, recent RTD performance reports do show improvements. Compared to the same period in 1989, 76% fewer bus runs were canceled on a daily basis last fall, daily weekday ridership was up 3%--to about 1.3 million--and the rate of reported criminal incidents had declined by about a third. Complaints increased by about 50%, but that is attributed to free-ride claims.

To critics, the free-ride program exemplifies Patsaouras’ fondness for what one transportation lobbyist disparagingly called his “extravaganzas--big, harebrained ideas that he doesn’t think through, that are just publicity splashes. . . . The technical considerations are not important to him. He wants to get things announced and done.”

Patsaouras readily admits that he doesn’t like to study “things to death.”

“Any idea, any program--if you discuss it long enough, you’ll find why you should not do it, why it’s not going to work. . . . I do things because they feel good.”

Feeeel gooood. He draws the words out and caresses them, a refrain that has become a moral imperative of sorts.

“Feels good, you do it. You start building up all these machinations. Life becomes complicated. Keep everything simple.”

Yet Patsaouras is hardly simple. He can be charismatic and seductively charming or so impatient and abrupt that one Los Angeles city councilman branded him “one of the most arrogant appointees on any city board.”

He is a seasoned political player who was named in 1982 to the Los Angeles Board of Zoning Appeals by a liberal Democratic mayor, a year after he was appointed to the RTD by a conservative Republican supervisor. A pragmatic Democrat, he has raised gobs of money for candidates of both parties.

His comments weave across the political map. To immigrant populism, he adds Kennedy liberalism, a Reagan-like idealization of the American dream, and a conservative businessman’s dislike of the slow-growth movement.

He claims to be at peace with himself, yet is intense and clearly driven. He rises before dawn, spends two to three days a week on RTD matters, sits on the zoning board, runs a small electrical engineering firm in West Los Angeles and is chairman of a small Westside bank he founded in the early ‘80s with fellow Greek Americans.

He has been on the go ever since he came to the San Fernando Valley as a poor, 17-year-old high school graduate from Athens, in search of the college education he couldn’t get in his homeland. The son of a night watchman, he held a drafting job while he studied--with a dictionary at his side--for an electrical engineering degree, first at Los Angeles Valley College and then at Cal State Northridge.

The day he took the exam for an engineering license he told his boss he would quit to start his own business as soon as a replacement could be found. Then he crisscrossed the county in a little Chevy without air conditioning, scrambling for contracts for his infant electrical engineering firm.

“Knock, knock, knock. I’m Nick Patsaouras with an accent, 23-year-old boy and how about you trust me with your engineering?”

Have you done it before?

“Yeah, in my mother’s womb.”

He still hates that question. “Give a guy a break,” he demands, his voice rising. “How’s he going to do it before if you don’t give him a chance?”

He met his wife, Sylvia, at a dance after college. “She was impressed by her father about Greek mythology. . . . So she says she read about it and then found it,” he recounts with a huge grin. She is studying for a master’s degree in urban planning at UCLA. They live in Tarzana and have two children, a 19-year-old UC Berkeley freshman and a 17-year-old high school senior who wants to go to Harvard.

Over roast lamb and red wine at a Greek restaurant in Santa Monica, the talk turns to politics. In 1980, Patsaouras made his one and only bid for elected office, running for the 5th District County Board of Supervisors seat, losing in the primary and endorsing the Republican contender, Michael Antonovich--who won and a few months later appointed Patsaouras to the RTD.

He has remained an ally of both Antonovich and Mayor Tom Bradley despite the fact that they are at opposite political poles. Indeed, some politicians whisper that Patsaouras never would have gained the board votes to be elected president last summer had it not been for Bradley’s help. Whatever the reason, both Bradley RTD appointees voted for Patsaouras.

He shrugs about planting a foot in both political camps. “I have always been in the center. . . . I like my independence,” he says, struggling to be heard over the whoops and claps of dancing waiters.

A veteran Bradley fund raiser, Patsaouras speaks of the fifth-term mayor in the political past tense.

“He will go down in history as a good mayor . . . (but) I don’t believe his style would fit the ‘90s.” Too passive and behind the scenes. “It won’t work anymore. A leader has to be aggressive, make the tough choices. Tom never moved (in front) of the parade.”

Asked about his political plans, Patsaouras flashes an innocent, “Who? Me?” look.

As for those who dismiss his RTD campaign as a political ploy, “I say, yeah, are you willing to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning? . . . The bottom line is, is something accomplished? I truly believe something is accomplished.”

So from press conferences to board meetings to bus bays he whirs, the corporate president who rode the bus as a penniless college student and now heads the company. But ah, he jokes, he’s still running after the bus. He makes a point of riding one at least once a week, taking notes on graffiti, rattles, missing signs.

The other days he drives the Mercedes.