Appointment of ‘Special Master’ for Freeway Urged

Appointment of a “special master” to run the complex, $2.5-billion Century Freeway project was recommended Thursday by special court-appointed consultants.

James Hunt, project manager for the accounting and management consulting firm of Price Waterhouse, told federal Judge Harry Pregerson that a special master is needed to end the “years of bureaucratic paralysis” that have plagued the project.

Pregerson presides over a 1981 consent decree under which the huge project, which includes a 17.3-mile freeway, a light rail line in the freeway median and several thousand units of affordable housing, is being built. He had asked Price Waterhouse to study problems that female and minority contractors were encountering.

But in a presentation before Pregerson in Pasadena, Hunt said a court-appointed special master is needed to run the entire project.

Substantial Authority

Such a master would work under Pregerson’s guidance but would have substantial authority over the California Department of Transportation, which is building the freeway, and the state Department of Housing and Community Development, which is attempting to provide the housing.

A second consulting firm--Hamilton, Rabinovitz & Alschuler--which was hired to study minority and female hiring on the Century Freeway job, also concluded that stronger administration is needed.

“I don’t see the need for new organizations,” consultant Edward K. Hamilton told Pregerson, “but there is a need for someone who stands in the middle and drives this whole thing.”

To date, Century Freeway construction represents an effort “to do a mission-oriented task through an interagency committee, without a chairman,” Hamilton said. “There is no common agenda, no common authority. . . . Someone has to pull this structure together.”

Goals Exceeded

Price Waterhouse found that combined female and minority participation in construction of the freeway and the housing has exceeded goals established in the consent decree, but also found that “substantial financial losses or insolvencies have been experienced by as many as 80%” of the Century Freeway female and minority contractors and subcontractors.

To reduce this high failure rate, the management consultants recommended that a loan program be established so that firms run by women or racial minorities could obtain bonds or the money they need to buy or lease equipment.

Price Waterhouse also suggested that minority and female contractors be required to meet “pre-qualification standards” before bidding on Century Freeway jobs.

Caltrans now certifies that a firm is owned and operated by minorities or women but does not investigate the company’s business experience or capability.

The Hamilton, Rabinovitz & Alschuler study found that minority hiring goals have been met on both the freeway and housing components of the project to date but that female participation has been limited.

From January through May of this year, the consultants found, minorities accounted for 65.8% of housing construction jobs and 55% of freeway construction jobs but women made up only 4.1% of the housing work force and only 0.4% of the freeway workers.

‘Outreach Effort’

A “tremendous outreach effort” is needed to find more women workers for the freeway, Hamilton said, and even that probably would fall short of the 10% goal set by Pregerson.

Of all the proposals made by the two consultant teams, the most important and controversial is the recommendation for a special master, an idea that Pregerson has resisted in the past.

Attorneys for Caltrans and for the Federal Highway Administration, which provides 90% of the money for the project, had no comment on the special master proposal but both are expected to oppose it when they make formal replies to Pregerson within 30 days.

The Center for Law in the Public Interest, representing a coalition of plaintiffs in the case, has suggested such an appointment in the past and presumably will support the Price Waterhouse suggestion.

‘Unprecedented Undertaking’

“This is such an ambitious, complex and unprecedented undertaking that it requires constant supervision and oversight,” center attorney John Phillips said Thursday, “to be sure that all the great goals that are heralded in the courtroom are not lost out in the bureaucracy.”

The freeway, which will run between Norwalk and the eastern edge of Los Angeles International Airport, is about half finished and is expected to open in late 1993. So far about 1,300 housing units have been built or refurbished out of an expected total of 3,500 or more.