Troubled Port Commissioner Bows Out : Harbor: Robert Rados says his decision not to seek reappointment has nothing to do with questions about his firm’s contracts to build vessels for the city.

The Los Angeles port commissioner whose San Pedro firm was paid $1.5 million by the city to design two multimillion-dollar vessels announced Wednesday that he will not seek reappointment to the five-member commission.

Robert Rados Sr. said his departure after five years on the commission is not based on recent disclosures that his naval architecture company’s contracts were completed more than a year behind their original schedules and cost the city nearly three times the original estimates.

Instead, Rados, 68, said he decided months ago to step down from the panel when his current term expires Sunday.

“I have been actively involved in various businesses in the harbor area for the past 45 years,” Rados wrote in a Tuesday letter to Mayor Tom Bradley. “Some time ago, I decided after completing my term that I would reduce my activities and spend more time with my family.”

Bradley spokesman Bill Chandler said the mayor accepted Rados’ decision not to seek reappointment and thanked him for serving on the port commission and, before that, the city’s Community Redevelopment Commission.

Some officials at City Hall and the port said the recent attention to city contracts with Rados International Corp. had hurt Rados’ chance for reappointment.

However, Rados said he was not asked by the mayor to step aside, and Bradley’s spokesman said the commissioner’s decision was his own.

Rados’ farewell, shared with fellow commissioners and harbor-area Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores before his announcement, comes on the heels of last month’s decision by a City Council panel to cancel the last half of a $600,000 contract with Rados’ firm to design a new fireboat for the city.

Last month, The Times reported that Rados International was the only one of six companies bidding for the fireboat design contract to miss the city’s original 1987 deadline for proposals. After the deadline was extended, Rados bid $169,000 for the fireboat design and then saw its contract swell to $600,000 during negotiations with the city.

The fireboat, originally expected to cost $2.5 million and be in service a year ago, is now projected to cost $4.6 million and will not be built until late next year. The construction contract has not been bid.

Earlier, The Times also reported that Rados International had been paid $1.2 million by the city’s Bureau of Sanitation to design and oversee the construction of a problem-plagued oceanographic vessel. That 1986 contract was originally bid at $466,000, and the vessel, La Mer, has so far cost the city $5.5 million--more than three times its original estimate of $1.5 million.

The city is looking at the cost and execution of La Mer’s design and construction contracts with the possibility of taking legal action to recover some of the money spent, according to officials in the city attorney’s office and the Bureau of Sanitation, which commissioned the ship.

In a brief interview Wednesday after his final commission meeting at the port headquarters in San Pedro, Rados talked about his resignation and the recent publicity.

“After 45 years, I reached goals that I intended and I spent seven years of my time donated to the city,” Rados said. “The articles in The Times have been inaccurate, sensationalism, and malicious. But they had no effect on my decision.”

Before ending the interview, Rados said his decision to step down had nothing to do with questions about his continuing residence outside the city of Los Angeles. Three years ago, the city attorney’s office ruled that Rados could live in the Rancho Palos Verdes home of his late mother because he had been unable to sell the home and intended someday to permanently return to his previous home in San Pedro.

The City Charter requires commissioners to be residents of the city.

In a story published Wednesday in The News Pilot, Rados made it clear that friends urged him to remain on the commission despite the scrutiny.

“Everyone in the waterfront and the community knows me,” he told the San Pedro paper. “The feeling was that I should fight this, but it’s just not worth it.”

As for his family-owned naval architecture firm and its contracts with the city, Rados also told the newspaper: “We’ve done beautiful things we’re proud of. Now the perception is that I’m a crook who was out to cheat the city.”

If Rados’ contracts with the city raised some eyebrows at City Hall, they did not appear to diminish his standing with fellow commissioners, port staff or harbor-area activists who praised his work as a port commissioner.

‘I don’t believe there is anyone on the commission who has put in the amount of hours that you have, and we all appreciate that,” Commission President Ronald Lushing told Rados at the end of Wednesday’s board meeting.

“We feel that all you have done has been for the betterment of the harbor . . . and we’ll all be sorry to see you go,” Lushing said.

Added Bill Schwab, a longtime Wilmington activist and president of that community’s historical society: “I know the Rados family has been here for years and years. Maybe so the name carries on, we could name a street after him or a channel.”

After Rados’ decision was announced, Councilwoman Flores also said she was sorry to see him leave the commission. “He told me he was considering withdrawing his name from nomination . . . (and) I really tried to discourage him from doing that,” Flores said.

“I feel disappointed,” she added, “because I think some people will draw the conclusion because of the difficulties or the questions about the contracts. And he told me a long time ago that wasn’t the reason he was going.”

Flores said she intends to submit names of possible successors to the mayor by early next week.

Flores declined to name any of those under consideration but said she hopes Bradley will name a San Pedro resident to the panel, which now includes only one harbor-area resident, Floyd Clay of Wilmington.