Torrance Waits to Select Adviser for Mobil : Safety: Three or four firms being considered to oversee operations at the refinery. The council is expected to decide on Tuesday.

Torrance city officials say they are going down to the wire in their search for the firm they will nominate to oversee operations at Mobil Oil’s Torrance refinery.

The City Council is expected to make its decision Tuesday night, one day before the deadline set by the city and Mobil.

The search is proving more difficult than anticipated, officials said.

“We’re going to go right up to the line on the decision,” said City Atty. Kenneth L. Nelson.

The list of firms has been whittled down to three or four, but no definitive front-runner has emerged, officials say. Despite dozens of interviews with candidates, the city wants to do more research before nominating its candidate to be the court-supervised safety adviser for the refinery.

One problem is the unusual nature of the job, which was created in an October pretrial settlement of the city’s 1989 public nuisance lawsuit against Mobil. The suit followed a series of accidents at the sprawling 750-acre refinery in northeast Torrance.

The safety adviser is considered integral to the agreement, since it will oversee the refinery for at least the next seven years.

“There is no precedent for this. . . . There are not firms that are designed exactly to fit this mold,” said Mayor Katy Geissert.

Another hurdle is that many firms with expertise in the refining industry have worked extensively for Mobil and other major oil companies, officials said.

“We want to make sure that familiarity has not resulted in some kind of closeness with the industry that’s not acceptable,” said Nelson, who estimates that the city has conducted more than 100 interviews with candidates, references and experts.

Mobil has nominated the Westinghouse Energy Systems Business Unit, part of Westinghouse Electric Corp.

City officials are reluctant to discuss the search. But they confirmed that they most recently have reviewed four firms: Arthur D. Little of Cambridge, Mass.; ENVIRON International of Arlington, Va.; SRI International of Menlo Park, and ACTA, a small Torrance firm.

The city is probably not going to pick Westinghouse, at least initially, Nelson said Wednesday.

The city and Mobil originally were to exchange names of their nominees by Nov. 22. At the city’s request, the deadline was extended to next Wednesday. If the city and Mobil cannot agree on a firm, the safety adviser will be chosen by retired Superior Court Judge Harry V. Peetris, who is overseeing the consent decree.

Interviews are being conducted by the city’s outside attorneys, as well as Nelson, City Manager Leroy Jackson, Fire Chief R. Scott Adams and Fire Marshal R. Richard Nanney. City Council members are not participating, and no interviews will be conducted in public, city officials said.

The City Council cannot interview consultant candidates in private under the Brown Act, the state’s open meetings law, the officials said. And the city does not want to conduct interviews in public, Geissert said. “Perhaps there would be a constraint in some of the responses and in some of the questions,” she said.

Plans now call for city staff to make its recommendations to the City Council Tuesday in a private session, Nelson said. He said he did not know if the council would vote on the safety adviser in public, but he said the name of the nominee would be made public.

Geissert said the city’s staff can make its recommendation privately because of attorney-client privilege.

Last month, Ralph Nutter, one of the attorneys representing the city, said the City Council should vote publicly on its choice of an adviser. Mobil, however, has opposed what it calls public announcements on “intermediate steps” in the selection process.

Under the pretrial agreement announced Oct. 18, the safety adviser will have the power to investigate safety issues at the refinery. One of its biggest roles will be to help determine the refinery’s future use of hydrofluoric acid.

Mobil agreed to phase out its use of the controversial, highly toxic acid by the end of 1997 unless it can develop a safer form by the end of 1994. The safety adviser will have to approve any modified use of the acid.

The firms being considered by the city vary in size and focus.

Arthur D. Little, a large consulting firm founded in 1886, employs more than 2,400 people and handles assignments in more than 60 countries in an average year, said John F. Peirson Jr., manager of the firm’s Santa Barbara office and a director of its environmental health and safety unit.

That office has done extensive consulting work for Santa Barbara County, evaluating such issues as offshore drilling, onshore transportation of oil and processing, Peirson said. The firm’s Cambridge and Los Angeles offices would also be involved in the safety adviser project, he said.

Nelson, formerly Santa Barbara County counsel, said he had been impressed with the work Arthur D. Little did in that county.

SRI International, founded in 1946, formerly had ties to Stanford University but is now an independent, nonprofit research and consulting firm, said Dennis D. Maxwell, who is vice president, corporate marketing and communications. The firm employs about 3,200 people in 15 major offices worldwide, he said.

SRI’s activities include engineering, physical sciences, business consulting and environmental policy work, he said. Maxwell said the firm is currently doing risk-analysis work at refineries and chemical plants in the United States and overseas, but he declined to name them, citing client confidentiality.

SRI is rushing to complete its proposal for Torrance, Maxwell said. “It’s right up our alley in terms of the work that we do,” he said.

ENVIRON employs more than 250 people in four offices, said George Linkletter, who manages the firm’s Irvine office. Founded in 1982, it has worked with many Fortune 500 companies across the country and concentrates on environmental health and safety issues, he said.

Linkletter said he cannot discuss the oil refineries his firm has worked for because of client confidentiality, but he said he does not think his firm has worked for Mobil. He was reluctant to talk about the Torrance safety adviser post.

“I don’t want to do or say something that’s disruptive to the city process,” Linkletter said.

Information was not available from the fourth firm, ACTA.

Westinghouse, meanwhile, has declined to discuss in any detail its qualifications for the safety adviser post or its risk-assessment work.

Several city officials said they are having to weigh the strong points and weak points of each firm.

“We are trying to come forward with someone who we have 100% confidence in,” said City Councilman Bill Applegate.

“It’s more or less a moving target,” Applegate said, “because you may find something you think may be improved upon by A, but B doesn’t have it, and C might have something, but they may not have what A may have.”