Flaws Bog Down Garage Project at Civic Center

With construction more than a year behind schedule and about $1.5 million over budget, a new 547-space county parking structure stands like a white elephant in the heart of the Civic Center.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away, work is a mere 90 days behind on a much larger, 2,076-space garage just west of Santa Ana Stadium. The city of Santa Ana and Orange County, which jointly operate the sprawling Civic Center complex, plan to open that structure by Jan. 29.

But the smaller garage, sandwiched between the county courthouse and the Santa Ana Central Library, will not be ready until May, officials say. And some Civic Center employees have been wondering if the garage, dubbed “the library site,” will ever open.

“It’s the smaller of the two lots, but by far the bigger pain,” said Jack Leaning, manager of the county’s architectural and engineering division.

It could all end up in a nasty court fight unless the parties involved can settle their differences in numerous meetings expected to take place over the next month.

The two parking structures are part of a major expansion of the Civic Center that will take place in phases that will continue into the next century. The larger one, known as the “stadium site,” was budgeted at $18 million. Its smaller cousin next to the courthouse was originally set at $6 million, but all the delays have caused the price tag to balloon to at least $7.5 million.

Nonetheless, R.A. (Bert) Scott, director of the county’s General Services Agency, stressed that “the county is going to come out of this whole. . . . The repairs will not cost the taxpayers a single penny.”

That’s because the costs have been absorbed so far by the architectural firm, IBI Group of Newport Beach, and the general contractor, DSP Constructors Inc., which is based in Connecticut but has a Southland office.

As yet, however, the final figures have not been resolved.

The two structures began with considerable hoopla, and government workers welcomed the beginning of construction. They were told that the two garages would combine to take care of the Civic Center’s needs. Motorists will have a choice of hourly, daily and monthly rates.

Construction began in early October, 1988, on the smaller garage, which is built on the site of the Santa Ana Library’s underground parking lot. Work on the larger garage by the stadium began almost a year later, in late August, 1989.

Government employees who watched the progress at the library site say they could not have known any problem was afoot. The foundation was poured, the beams went up, and when the garage seemed pretty much in place, elevators were built and the landscaping completed.

But in late summer, 1989, county inspectors noticed something: structural cracks that seemed to signal that something was fundamentally wrong.

“The project was about 85% completed and we had no reason up to then to believe anything was wrong,” Leaning said.

“We began divvying up a list of things that needed to be done and tried to assign them as best we could to the parties responsible,” he said.

Some remedial work went to DSP, much of it to IBI and its subcontractors responsible for the engineering. IBI, at its own expense, has hired a new general contractor, McCarthy Bros., to complete the work.

In the meantime, the Civic Center Authority--the mix of Santa Ana and county officials responsible for overseeing operation of the complex--began withholding $2,000 a day in payments to DSP when the project was not completed on time. Those withholdings eventually amounted to $900,000, Leaning said.

Another thing that rattled the Civic Center Authority was that IBI was also overseeing the larger stadium site garage along with Bomel Construction Co., out of Orange. Fearing the worst, new inspections took place at the big garage to see if it shared any of the smaller site’s problems. Fortunately for all involved, the larger project was in order.

Slowly, work on the larger garage began to outpace the progress of the smaller structure. The first two phases of the larger garage--a 620-vehicle surface structure adjacent to the garage on its west side, and the first 800 stalls of the garage--were completed last October.

“It’s a beautiful structure; the Bomel people have done a great job,” Leaning said.

So who should get the lion’s share of the blame for the other site?

Many employees at the Civic Center blame the county (meaning the Civic Center Authority), since it was supposed to be overseeing the work.

Scott of the county’s General Services Agency countered that “a homeowner can’t know every single detail when someone is building him a house.”

In fact, Scott insisted, county officials deserve credit for discovering the errors in the first place.

But IBI director L. Paul Zajfen, chafing a bit at accusations aimed in the direction of his firm, said, “The county can’t be left out of some responsibility for this.”

Zajfen declined to say any more about the garage construction, citing the potential for litigation.

“We had an unblemished record before this and we think our record remains unblemished,” Zajfen said.

At DSP, its president, Tomas D. Oxley, does not hide that the mere mention of the problems with the smaller garage is a painful subject for him.

“We always pride ourselves on finishing a project on time; this one just didn’t work out,” Oxley said.

But he declined further comment, on advice of his attorneys.

Leaning said that with the garage construction back on a readjusted schedule, it’s now time to figure out who owes what.

“None of the parties wants this to go to court,” he said. “That would be very expensive for everybody.”