Estimates for Airport Quadruple : Construction: County says it will cost as much as $1.6 million to complete new parking garage and road project begun by Taylor Woodrow Construction.

County officials say it will cost up to $1.6 million to complete a new parking garage and road at John Wayne Airport--four times more than the airport’s embattled prime contractor predicted before being fired from that work in May.

“It’s shocking news to hear that kind of disparity,” Supervisor Thomas F. Riley said Friday. “But since one figure is from a company that has been let go, how do you evaluate their estimate as opposed to somebody else’s?”

Officials with Taylor Woodrow Construction California Ltd., which held the $25-million garage and road contracts until delays prompted supervisors to take them away, branded the completion estimate “incredibly excessive.”

In a letter to County Counsel Adrian Kuyper, a Taylor Woodrow attorney said the firm stands ready to resume both projects and perform the work within four weeks for between $254,000 and $440,000.

“Taylor Woodrow protests this unwise and, we believe, illegal proposal and is continuing to explore its judicial remedies,” company officials said in an accompanying statement.

After being stripped of the garage and elevated-road contracts May 22, Taylor Woodrow filed a Superior Court lawsuit seeking to win them back. To date, however, there have been no hearings in the case.

Supervisors allowed the firm to retain its main contract for construction of the $62-million passenger terminal. But to ensure that the airport opens Sept. 16, they imposed a strict timetable for completion of that work.

The Taylor Woodrow letter Friday criticized the county for giving the garage and road contracts to the Irvine-based McCarthy Brothers construction company without requiring competitive bids. And it said that Taylor Woodrow has now obtained a new “A” state engineering license, which supervisors had criticized the firm for previously allowing to lapse.

Since May, representatives from the county, an airport consultant and McCarthy Brothers have been assessing what work remains on the garage and road, and county officials say they now have concluded that the jobs will cost much more, partly because of the need to correct some design and construction-related errors.

In the 1,611-space parking garage, “the extent of remaining work . . . is vast,” according to a change order written for the proposed county-McCarthy payment agreement. “ . . . Especially the correction of construction errors of precast panel connections, steel frames for glazed stair enclosures and louvers” and “testing and commissioning of the entire mechanical, electrical, control, fire protection systems.”

The elevated road, another change order states, also requires substantial additional work, including the installation of seismic restraints at each “hinge,” or joint, where road sections are attached.

A McCarthy Brothers spokesman would say only that the airport staff and HPV, the consulting firm hired to oversee the $310-million airport terminal and parking garage expansion program, had set what was believed to be a fair price.

A proposed payment agreement between the county and McCarthy Brothers is scheduled to come before the Orange County Airport Commission for approval on Monday night, and then the Board of Supervisors the following morning.

“We really don’t think the cost of these things is significantly more than what it would have cost us to have Taylor Woodrow do these same things,” said Alan Murphy, the airport staff’s project supervisor.

“This is being done on a ‘time and materials’ basis not to exceed a specified amount,” Murphy explained. “So the job could come in for less than that.”

Added Riley: “Some of the money to be paid McCarthy is for fixes, but some of it is holdbacks from Taylor Woodrow because we were waiting to see what kind of job they did,” said Riley. “I don’t expect this cost to be new money added to the project budget.”

The airport expansion, plagued by costly delays and cost overruns, includes a new 338,000-square-foot passenger terminal, three garages, new freeway ramps, roads, street widenings, new aircraft aprons, taxiways and fuel facilities, among other things.

Although parts of the projects have come in on time and under budget, the terminal being built by Taylor Woodrow--as was the garage and road--is months behind schedule and millions of dollars over original estimates.