Airport Contractors Threaten Walkout, Cite Non-Payment

Claiming that they have not been paid in months, several subcontractors involved in construction of the new John Wayne Airport passenger terminal threatened Thursday to walk off their jobs, airport officials said.

Alan Murphy, the county’s airport project director, said that he immediately asked Taylor Woodrow Construction California Ltd., the prime contractor on the terminal project, to account for $6.2 million that the county has already paid it. Murphy said he expects a reply today or Monday.

Officials of Taylor Woodrow, which is based in New York but has offices in Irvine, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

The subcontractors’ threats are only the latest in a series of problems that the terminal project has encountered--problems that began when the original prime contractors’ bids came in much higher than expected. In recent months, there has been speculation that the terminal’s opening date of April 1, 1990, may be in danger.

On Thursday, one of the subcontractors on the terminal project said that about six firms claim they have completed substantial portions of their work but have received no money or very little money for periods going back as far as August. Other subcontractors said the dispute may involve as many 10 or more firms, some of which are owed money on additional work that they were asked to perform beyond that required by their original contracts.

“You can only put out a certain amount of dollars for only so long before you run into trouble if you don’t get paid,” said Jack Garoutte, vice president of Rebar Engineering Inc., one of the subcontractors involved in the dispute. “Some companies may not be able to continue to work.”

Rebar has a $900,000 contract to supply reinforcing steel for the terminal project. Garoutte said his firm has performed about two-thirds of its assigned work and has been owed $400,000 since the end of November. Another $118,000 is owing for December but is not yet overdue, he added.

“We’re getting two different stories--one from Taylor Woodrow and one from the county,” Garoutte said. “Taylor Woodrow says it hasn’t been paid by the county, but the county says that’s not true.”

The terminal project is part of a $300-million airport expansion program.

Richard Begley, project manager for HPV, a consulting firm that is overseeing the expansion, said that he personally expedited delivery of a payment of county money to Taylor Woodrow recently to ensure that a particular subcontractor was paid. But he said he later learned that the subcontractor had not received the money.

“We’re investigating the situation to see what happened,” Begley said.

Manuel Luera, president of Avance Engineering Co., a Covina-based excavation firm, said that Taylor Woodrow owes his company $250,000 and that Avance has not been paid for 3 months.

“All indications,” Luera said, “are that we won’t be paid on it for another 3 or 4 months. . . . One subcontractor has been finished for a long time and hasn’t been paid since September.”

Luera said Murphy had asked him and other subcontractors Thursday to give him information about the alleged non-payments.

“We’re doing that, and we hope this gets resolved right away,” Luera said. “We’re fairly small. . . . As far as I know we’re the only minority contractor out there, and we’re fairly new. This is what puts small companies out of business.”

Luera said his firm has worked for Taylor Woodrow on other projects and had no trouble getting paid.

The terminal project has been controversial from the beginning, when all the bids for the job of prime contractor came in $19 million to $20 million above the $40 million that the county had budgeted for it. That led to a major redesign of the project to cut costs by $10 million.

Some critics have charged that the county should have called for new bids rather than accepting the low bid and then ordering cutbacks. But airport manager George Rebella has argued that the county could not afford to delay construction because income from airlines using the new facility is needed by April 1 of next year to start repaying the bonds sold to finance the project.

Others believe that the team of architects who designed the terminal relied on grossly inaccurate cost estimates for construction materials, especially steel.

Murphy and Rebella said Thursday they are confident that the subcontractors’ complaints will not delay the terminal’s completion. “They wanted a meeting next week,” Murphy said, “but I felt it was important to get on this today so the matter can be resolved right away.”