Repairing Slide Damage to Cost Torrance $5.2 Million

A major landslide that carved a deep gash in the north face of the Palos Verdes Peninsula also has dug a deep hole in the Torrance city budget.

Torrance taxpayers will have spent at least $5.2 million on the landslide by the time the long and difficult task of rebuilding the heavily damaged hillside is completed in November.

The slide on a city-owned hillside two years ago this month destroyed a pair of expensive homes and forced a series of temporary repair measures. A highly visible black plastic sheet was placed over the hillside to channel rainwater and prevent more damage during the winter months.

The heavy plastic was removed this week, marking the start of the seven-month project to rebuild the hillside between Via Corona and Vista Largo, south of Pacific Coast Highway.

While the project is under way this spring, summer and fall, dump trucks hauling tons of dirt and replacement fill will move through the residential area of south Torrance every few minutes on weekdays.

By replacing loose dirt with more cohesive soil, installing drainage systems and contouring the hillside, Torrance hopes to improve upon nature. “Nature didn’t do too well,” said Phil Tilden, the city’s capital projects administrator.

However, rebuilding the hillside also has forced Torrance officials into a financial juggling act. The April, 1986, landslide has stripped the city’s entire parks and recreation project fund, depleted the catastrophic insurance reserve to almost nothing and drained a variety of special funds that had been set aside for sewer and drainage projects.

City Manager LeRoy Jackson told the City Council last month that unexpected expenditures for landslide repairs combined with other budget problems have “all placed a strain on our fiscal viability.”

Torrance Finance Director Mary Giordano likened the landslide expense to the damage Redondo Beach suffered from January’s fierce storm, with one major difference--there are no federal disaster funds to ease the pain.

“We had a catastrophe and it definitely impacts us,” Giordano said. “It leaves us scrambling for a way to pay for that.”

The landslide repairs “heavily taxed our park and facilities funds,” Giordano said.

Delayed Projects

Park projects, including the restoration of the Madrona Marsh, improvements to the Greenwood School site and furnishing of the city’s planned Cultural Arts Center, may be delayed because capital improvement money was diverted to landslide repairs.

Jackson defended the use of $1.1 million in park and recreation funds--all of the capital budget for the department in fiscal 1987-88--for the landslide, saying the hillside will be preserved as open space.

A storm-drain project planned for the city’s Hollywood Riviera area also has been postponed.

Rebuilding the catastrophic insurance reserves and repaying money borrowed from other internal funds will affect the city’s operating budget for several years to come.

“The major impact on the general fund was depletion of the self-insurance reserves, plus the loss of interest on all those dollars,” Giordano said.

Cause of Shortfall

Almost one-third of a possible $1 million to $1.5 million shortfall the city may face in the 1988-89 budget is due to the need to replenish the insurance reserves, Giordano said.

The city is now developing a specific spending plan that may force program cuts or tax increases to balance the budget. The figures were given to the council last month during a preliminary discussion of next year’s budget.

Giordano said the city would be prudent to have $1.5 million to $2 million on hand in the catastrophic insurance reserve rather than the $15,000 that is left. Next year’s preliminary budget earmarks about $500,000 for the reserve fund.

The City Council last month approved more than $2.9 million in emergency expenditures for the rebuilding project without competitive bidding. That expenditure is in addition to $2.2 million spent earlier on temporary repairs and purchase of two homes, including one owned by former Mayor Albert Isen.

Torrance officials have been meeting monthly with residents of the landslide area to inform them of details involved with the complicated rebuilding project.

An estimated 12,600 dump truck trips will be needed to haul 80,000 cubic yards of loose soil out of the slide area and replace it with 110,000 cubic yards of more stable soil brought in from outside.

Trucks will make six or seven trips each hour to and from the slide area and will leave Torrance via Pacific Coast Highway and Hawthorne Boulevard south to the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Tilden said.