Cost of Legal Battle Against Mobil Rising for Torrance : Refinery: The city sets aside an additional $300,000 for lawyers’ fees. It has already spent nearly $1.4 million in its bid to regulate the plant.

The Torrance City Council, faced with mounting attorneys’ bills, appropriated an additional $300,000 on Tuesday to fund its legal dueling with Mobil Oil Corp.

The city already has spent nearly $1.4 million on costs related to the public-nuisance lawsuit that it filed against Mobil more than two years ago. A consent decree intended to settle that suit was announced amid fanfare in October and hailed by both parties as the settlement of their dispute.

But skirmishing between the city and Mobil has continued, and so has the stream of lawyers’ bills.

City legal costs could reach $500,000 for the first stage of implementing the consent decree, according to City Atty. Kenneth L. Nelson. That would bring the city’s total cost for the suit to $1.7 million by the end of 1991.

One reason for the increased costs so far is that the city and the industrial giant are in sharp disagreement over which outside firm should serve as safety adviser at Mobil’s 750-acre refinery in Torrance. The post, created in the consent decree, is central to the agreement. More than six months later, however, the adviser has yet to be named.

The city and Mobil failed to agree on a candidate. Instead, they submitted nominations to the judge overseeing the decree, who is expected to make a decision at any time.

In addition, if the city’s preferred candidate is not chosen, legal costs could climb even higher, said a city lawyer. “I think the lawyers would have to work harder to assure compliance,” said Ralph Nutter, the retired Superior Court judge who is serving as outside lead counsel for the city in the Mobil case.

The council approved the $300,000 appropriation Tuesday without debate.

Mayor Katy Geissert said she hopes the city will not have to spend the entire $300,000. Once the safety adviser is appointed, legal costs will drop dramatically, Geissert said.

However, Councilman Dan Walker predicted that the city will be “spending money on attorneys from now until the end of this agreement.”

But, he added, “if that’s what you’ve got to do to achieve eliminating hydrofluoric acid . . . then that’s the price you’ve got to pay, and I’m willing to do that.”

Hydrofluoric acid is an acutely toxic chemical used in a process that boosts the octane of unleaded gasoline.

The city brought its suit against Mobil in April, 1989, arguing that the Mobil refinery in Torrance was a public nuisance and seeking the power to regulate it. The suit mirrored growing concern over a series of explosions, fires and other problems at the refinery and increasing public awareness about the particular hazards of hydrofluoric acid, which forms a ground-hugging, toxic cloud when released.

In October, on the eve of trial, the city and Mobil signed the consent decree to keep the case out of court. At the time, both sides said the agreement would avoid a costly court case.

The decree, which runs through December, 1997, calls for a court-supervised adviser who will monitor safety and environmental matters at the plant. As part of the decree, Mobil agreed to phase out its use of hydrofluoric acid by the end of 1997 unless it can develop a safer form of the acid by the end of 1994.

At the time the decree was signed, the city had spent $1.1 million to $1.2 million in legal fees, Nelson said. It has spent about $200,000 since then to implement the decree.

Most of the city money earmarked for legal fees went to pay Nutter and another outside firm, Hedges, Powe & Caldwell, that is assisting the city in the case.

Mobil hired the firm of Latham & Watkins. A Mobil spokesman declined Wednesday to discuss the corporation’s legal costs or what it has paid for court costs. Mobil agreed to pay court expenses and to pay for the safety adviser as part of the decree.

The most expensive legal work for the city was the pretrial discovery process, in which attorneys for the city accumulated hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from Mobil and other sources, Nelson said.

But he called that money well spent, saying the research helped persuade Mobil to settle.

“It turned out to be the secret of our success,” Nelson said.

The search for a safety adviser has also proven expensive.

The agreement called for the city and Mobil to exchange names of potential candidates within 30 days. In November, Mobil nominated a unit of Westinghouse Electric Corp. of Pittsburgh. The city rejected Westinghouse and instead nominated SRI International of Menlo Park.

“We interviewed 35 candidates, and that was a long, arduous process,” Nutter said.

Nelson added: “It’s turned out to be a lot more time--with all these hearings, all these interviews--than we anticipated.”

Mobil spokesman James A. Carbonetti said the oil company “had no preconceived time frame” of how long it would take to select the safety adviser.