Corruption Inquiries Led to Firing, Former Transit Worker Says : Construction: Commission ex-employee says he was investigating incompetence at several projects. Board spokeswoman denies his allegations.

A former Los Angeles County Transportation Commission employee said Wednesday that he was fired for investigating incompetence and corruption in subway and streetcar construction projects.

Allegations by former contracts compliance officer Robert S. Inouye, made on the steps of City Hall, are an expansion of assertions made in a $5-million wrongful-termination lawsuit he filed Oct. 9 in an effort to regain his job at the transit agency.

Inouye said he has been unable to find another job since being laid off in 1990, ostensibly because his job was transferred to a private contractor to save money.

“To prevent me from stumbling into a political mine field, I was labeled a whistle-blower and fired before I could prove allegations of illegal activity and wrongdoing,” Inouye said.

The commission discounted Inouye’s allegations.

“They have all been investigated by . . . outside agencies, and all have been discarded,” spokeswoman Stephanie Brady said.

Jack White, chief of investigations for Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, said he “didn’t find any criminal wrongdoing” when his office looked into Inouye’s charges in 1989. However, he said, “evidence of administrative bungling did exist,” and he sent it to commission Executive Director Neil Peterson--along with Inouye’s name.

Inouye’s job was eliminated less than a year later.

The veteran auditor tried to regain his job using a state law that protects employees who sincerely alert authorities to improprieties, but the district attorney’s office said that government workers are not covered by the law.

In his lawsuit and in his City Hall speech, Inouye alleged a number of shortcuts and cover-ups, including:

* $3.7 million in contracts were steered to a friend of Mayor Tom Bradley.

* Metro Rail contractors often worked without any independent supervision, and were then allowed to self-certify their work.

* An inspector at Transit Consultants of California who photographed 55 construction faults, such as cracked manhole covers, was ordered by his bosses to ignore all the defects.

* The commission ordered inspectors to ignore a failed soil-compaction test for a 150-foot section of the Blue Line and to conduct a new test under a different section of track.

* The commission awarded a $5-million contract for concrete railroad ties to an Oakland company even though Inouye asserted that company did not comply with state labor laws. When the company later withdrew, its performance bond was returned unused and the ties were bought elsewhere for $6 million.

* That railroad tie contract later was extended, without competitive bidding, to supply ties for the Metro Green Line, which runs down the median of the Century Freeway from Norwalk to El Segundo, even though the two projects had different funding sources.

In his most controversial allegation, Inouye asserted that political influence was used to steer five minority business enterprise subcontracts to Warren Hollier, a friend of the mayor and former Los Angeles City public works commissioner.

Bradley spokesman Bill Chandler dismissed Inouye’s mention of the mayor as a calculated bid to draw attention to the other allegations. “Their charges against the mayor are a stretch of the imagination . . . and completely false,” he said.

Bradley sits on the Transportation Commission, which approves all mass-transit contracts, and he had the opportunity for special influence as vice chairman in 1986 and chairman in 1987, the years Hollier won subcontracts. But Chandler said the mayor and his proxy, Ray Remy, voted only on the basis of prime contractors and were unaware if any had hired Hollier.

Inouye inaccurately said that Hollier’s company, Hollier Engineering and Construction Corp., failed to finish all its contracts, commission records show. Hollier actually completed four of the five contracts, earning $3.7 million. Hollier said his company was released from the fifth job after a dispute with the prime contractor over prices and a performance bond.

“He (Inouye) is a goddamned liar,” Hollier said. “I’ve held a number of contracts over the years--and I have never needed anyone’s help to get them.”

Meanwhile, other prosecutors familiar with Inouye’s case were critical of how the district attorney’s office divulged Inouye’s name to his bosses in a letter warning of mismanagement.

“The inevitable last act on a letter like that is, the employee gets fired,” said one man who had heard of Inouye’s story. “I don’t think it takes a lot of foresight to see that.”

White said simply that he never promised to keep Inouye’s name secret from his superiors.