MWD May Move Headquarters Out of City

Reversing an earlier decision to create several outlying offices for its administrators and technical staff, the Metropolitan Water District board decided Tuesday to settle in one central headquarters, possibly outside downtown Los Angeles.

The district’s decision alarmed City Council members, who voted Tuesday to ask the agency to stay downtown, rather than move to La Verne, Ontario or City of Industry.

“It’s a lot of jobs and all the activity is downtown, so we think it’s important that they stay downtown,” said City Council President John Ferraro, who introduced the motion. “We have economic reasons and we have prestige reasons for wanting them here.”

District board members said they would like to keep some kind of downtown facility for political reasons, but they hinted that their final decision may be steered primarily by finances.

“It is more costly to have a centralized organization here in downtown Los Angeles,” said Christine Reed, a board director from Santa Monica. “I don’t believe the rate payers or the taxpayers can undertake the luxury of that kind of facility.”

The district’s 30-year-old headquarters on Sunset Boulevard was designed to accommodate 635 employees, and was originally considered big enough to take the district into the 21st Century.

Now, however, 845 administrative and technical workers vie for space in the building. District planners, who say 600,000 square feet of office space is needed, project that the headquarters staff could swell to 1,600 by 2010.

Eleven sites are being considered, including two near the existing headquarters and three that would require moving all district headquarters operations to an outlying area. Preliminary cost estimates place a suburban move at $93 million, while selecting a downtown site could cost $119 million to $159 million.

The board approved a staff recommendation Tuesday to begin searching for a centralized site.