Unfinished Civic Center Cause of Council Wrangle

A tangle of electrical wire spills across the floor of the future police dispatch center, like an errant batch of spaghetti. Empty holding cells are packed with sandbags to absorb the rain that poured into the building two weeks ago. The carpet in a would-be squad room is still damp after being flooded with water dripping down the walls.

“Last week, it was up over the soles of your shoes in here,” said a police official, sourly surveying water stains in the carpeting.

This is South Pasadena’s brand new police headquarters, which was scheduled to be occupied by the 40-member department 1 1/2 months ago. It is just one part of the city’s long-debated, $3.9-million civic center, which has once again become the subject of bitter wrangling among South Pasadena’s fractious political leadership.

Placing Blame

Politicians and city officials used to argue about the cost of the 20,000-square-foot project, but now they discourse about who is to blame for its unfinished state. Responding to growing concerns from civic leaders and municipal workers, the City Council has fired the general contractor. The project was originally scheduled to have been completed in July, a target that has been pushed back at least half a dozen times.

The complex will eventually house, in a new white-and-brick-red police and fire headquarters and a renovated City Hall, most of South Pasadena’s administrative staff and public safety workers. But the new building remains largely unoccupied, with piles of construction materials standing near the Mission Street entrance and along its Mound Avenue side, and renovations on the adjacent City Hall yet to begin.

“The building leaks like a sieve,” City Manager John Bernardi said of the police and fire headquarters. “We’ve got to stop the leaks from top to bottom before we move the police in.” He cited delays, defective workmanship and failure of coordination in terminating Vienna/Vienna Contractors of Glendora.

Firefighters Moved In

So far, the Fire Department has moved into the eastern half of the new structure (“We’re floating around in here,” said one firefighter last week), but the Police Department remains ensconced in cramped quarters on the ground floor of City Hall.

The city, which is now acting as its own contractor, hopes to get the Police Department into its new quarters in three months, Bernardi said. “Once we do that,” he said, “we’ll have some breathing room.” The renovation of City Hall cannot begin until the police vacate their current quarters.

Sam G. Vienna, president of the contracting company, heatedly defended his work, blaming faulty design and “political problems” for the deficiencies in the police and fire facility. His company will go to arbitration with the city over the dispute, as provided for in the contract.

As with most major issues in South Pasadena, public discussion of events relating to the civic center has been accompanied by recriminations.

Leading the way in hurling charges and countercharges has been Councilman Robert Wagner, the city government’s contentious odd man out. Wagner, who has been on the short end of a series of 4-to-1 votes since he was elected in 1984, charges that there have been “errors in judgment and poor management” on the part of municipal staffers and of Councilman Lee Prentiss, who was mayor when many of the construction problems first developed.

Who Was in Charge?

“The city knew months ago that there were problems with the job,” Wagner said during a brief tour of the construction site last week. “My question is, who was minding the store while the building was being built?”

“I think the guy is losing his marbles,” responded Mayor James Hodge. “It appears that he’s trying to hurt the city in arbitration with the contractors. That’s incomprehensible, coming from somebody who’s supposed to be representing the city. . . . The only thing I can conclude is that he has political motives. With the election coming up, he’s trying to stir up whatever he can.”

Wagner’s four-year term ends next spring.

Wagner contends that Bernardi, Prentiss or George Boghossian, whose Glendale engineering firm represented the city on the job site, should have moved to stop the project early this year. “In my opinion, the leading parties in the field could have put a stop order on the project when they started to see evidence of improper work,” he said.

Neither Prentiss, who was the council’s liaison for the project, nor Boghossian returned phone calls.

Benefit of Doubt

Bernardi replied that Wagner misrepresents the procedures followed in cases in which a contractor is charged with deficiencies. The contract with Vienna required that he be given every benefit of the doubt, the city manager insisted.

“We gave the contractor every opportunity to correct his own mistakes,” Bernardi said. “We finally reached the point where it just wasn’t happening. We had to take action.”

The controversial Wagner, a self-styled fiscal conservative who has been a frequent critic of his council colleagues, was elected on a pledge to save the taxpayers more than $2 million by building the police and fire facility at its present site, next to a renovated City Hall.

Interestingly, he has become the major critic of the project, which some civic leaders still term “Wagner’s folly.”

It was Wagner who spearheaded a successful ballot initiative to have the center built at the Mission Street location, for a projected cost of $2.5 million, rather than on city-owned property on El Centro Street, for about $5 million. The El Centro site would have included a new city hall. And he acknowledged using the civic center as his principal campaign issue.

$1.4 Million Over Estimates

But when projected costs earlier this year exceeded Wagner’s original estimates by about $1.4 million, the councilman moved to distance himself from the project. At council meetings this fall, he began expressing surprise at the sizes of cost overruns, blaming waste and mismanagement.

Wagner continues to sound that theme in public statements. For example, he charged last week that the city had been wasteful in its payments to Boghossian. He said that under council-imposed guidelines, the job manager, who inspects critical construction procedures, was to have been paid no more than $5,000 a month.

“But in one 12-month period--between November, 1986, and October, 1987--he was paid $114,000,” Wagner said.

Bernardi denied that there had been any improprieties in paying Boghossian, who was frequently paid less than $5,000 in a given month because of limited time he spent then on the site.

The $5,000 cap was a guideline, Bernardi insisted, and the city was justified on occasion to ignore it. “We needed the inspector on the job site,” he said. “The contractor was out there building a building, and we couldn’t send the inspector away just because he had reached his $5,000 limit.”

Hodge supported Bernardi in the assertion that the contract with Vienna could not have been terminated earlier. “The city doesn’t have the right to go on the site and tell the contractor to do anything differently unless it’s a violation of the city building code,” Hodge added.

Work for Inspectors

Both Hodge and Bernardi insisted that it was not Boghossian’s responsibility to inspect construction for simple deficiencies. “The law requires that we have certified building inspectors to inspect structural masonry, structural welding and 2,000-pound concrete (or mortar designed to withstand 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch),” Bernardi said. “That’s what George was doing.”

Boghossian’s duties also included negotiating with the contractor the costs of design modifications, he said, but not ensuring “quality control,” which was the contractor’s responsibility.

The city summarized the case against Vienna in a termination letter, which Bernardi said “only scratches the surface.”

Among the complaints were: “excessive delays” for reasons that were “within the control of the contractor”; a pattern of “inferior workmanship,” leading to block walls that were not waterproof, errors in elevation and finish on the concrete entry court and gaps in completed walls; and a failure to “coordinate the work of the subcontractors,” many of whom have sued the city for Vienna’s failure to pay them.

Before the contractor was dismissed, the city had paid the firm about $2.3 million. Another 10% had been withheld as a guarantee that the work would be completed, Bernardi said.

For his part, Vienna charged that most of the delays in the project had come as a result of “change orders” or ongoing modifications in the design of the structure, and that the leaks and other problems resulted from “architectural defects.”

May Go to Court

Architect Peter de Bretteville responded skeptically to Vienna’s assertions that delays were related to design defects. “Of course, he’ll say that,” De Bretteville said. “He’s the contractor.” But the architect said that he would not comment further, because of the likelihood that the matter would end up in litigation.

Vienna also charged that the he is being made a scapegoat for the city’s inability to get enough voter support last month to pass a 4% utility tax. “Before the election, Bernardi told me, ‘Sam, if this goes down, we’ve got a real problem,’ ” Vienna said. “I had no idea at the time that the tax initiative meant the life or death of the project.”

Bernardi scoffed at Vienna’s assertion that money from the proposed utility tax would have paid for construction of the center. “This project was planned years before the utility tax was conceived of,” he said. The center is being paid for from the sale of city-owned property in the Los Altos neighborhood.

The city manager added that the contractor had been granted 34 days in extensions to deal with an estimated 125 change orders, which have amounted to about 5% of the cost of construction.

Not Out of Bounds

Bernardi said that the number of change orders was actually unusually small. “Generally speaking, if you’re holding to 10% on your change orders, you’re doing pretty good,” he said. Bernardi insisted that the construction project is not significantly over budget.

Vienna complained that disagreements between the principals on the job site had been unusually rancorous.

So tense had relations become between himself and Boghossian, Vienna said, that they almost came to blows two weeks ago. He said that during a tour of the police and fire headquarters, he had complained to Bernardi and Boghossian about design defects with regard to waterproofing.

“I said I had been writing letters for months,” Vienna said. “I said, ‘George, your problem is that you can’t read. If you’d open your eyes and pay attention, we wouldn’t have these problems.’ He picked up a roofing tile and threw it at me, and he swung at me. He tried to get around Bernardi to throw me off the roof.”

Bernardi would not comment on the incident.

The city manager is hopeful that the civic center problem will fade by the end of March, when police should be in their new quarters.

“But then,” he conceded, “my ability to predict the completion date in the past has been less than good.”