Green Line Cost May Leap by Another $276 Million : Transit: Paying for driverless cars and construction problems may require a ‘blank check,’ official warns.

Delays in building technically advanced driverless cars, finding a suitable route and dealing with toxic and explosive gas-laden soils may balloon the cost of the Metro Green Line by another $276 million, engineers said Wednesday.

The concession came as the project’s chief engineer asked a Los Angeles County Transportation Commission committee to approve an immediate, $109-million increase in the project’s budget, with the promise of additional increases of between $112 million and $167 million in January.

These increases, with others already approved, would boost the project cost by as much as 41% over its original $814-million price tag.

Commission member Nikolas Patsaouras said the mushrooming budget amounts to a “blank check” that is draining money from other rail rapid transit projects that will probably have to be delayed or canceled for lack of money.

The 26-mile Norwalk-to-El Segundo Green Line has been in trouble for months, chiefly because of the cost of making it the nation’s first fully automated, driverless system. Now, broader problems are surfacing, from delays caused by digging up hazardous materials to added costs for mitigating hazards posed to airplanes at nearby Los Angeles International Airport.

Members of the LACTC’s Planning and Mobility Improvement Committee agreed to about half of Chief Engineer Edward McSpedon’s $109-million request, delaying a decision on $64 million in additional design and management consultant fees until firm contracts have been worked out.

But committee Chairwoman Jacki Bacharach made it clear that she believes the commission has little choice but to eventually grant most additional funding requests because it cannot leave the Green Line half-finished. The project is about 10% complete.

Granting all of the requested funds, however, could push the Green Line’s budget well over $1 billion, a sum that critics fear may come at the expense of other elements of the LACTC’s 30-year master plan, such as proposed light-rail lines to Glendale, Whittier and Santa Monica.

Much of the mushrooming cost is attributable to last October’s decision by the LACTC, led by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, to reaffirm its use of experimental, custom-built driverless cars. The board was forced to review its decision because of the rising cost of the cars and their computerized control system.

“What you did at your (October) meeting is, you wrote a blank check. You said that you were going to build the Green Line, as is, come what may,” said United Transportation Union representative Goldie Norton, who spoke as a private citizen.

” . . . Why don’t you also come out and say right now what this is going to cost the Westside, the Valley, Pasadena and other areas? Which project serving those areas is not going to get built as promised?”

The committee did not address that question Wednesday. But LACTC Executive Director Neil Peterson is privately reassessing his plan to build 350 miles of rail rapid transit, set aside 250 miles of freeway car pool lanes and buy 4,200 new buses for the county, most of it within a decade.

That ambitious program, which would give Los Angeles the nation’s second-largest rail rapid transit network, earlier this year was estimated to cost $150 billion. It is to be funded primarily by a pair of half-cent sales-tax surcharges approved by voters in 1980 and 1990.

The 1990 surcharge, however, has been tied up in a court challenge for more than a year. The 1980 surcharge, meanwhile, is not generating as much revenue as projected because the recession has dampened retail sales in the county. This has left the LACTC with a $133-million shortfall in the current fiscal year, and a similar shortfall is projected for next year.

At the same time, rail rapid transit projects--the Blue Line to Long Beach, the Red Line to Hollywood and now the cross-county Green Line--are all costing more than expected. Finally, the purchase of commuter-train tracks from the Santa Fe Railway Co. also may cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than expected; negotiations are stalled over the final price tag.

If the LACTC is forced to delay or shed rail lines, it could endanger the political coalition supporting the entire plan. Some cities, such as Glendale and Santa Monica, have contributed millions of dollars to perishable feasibility studies on the rail lines promised to them.

McSpedon conceded Wednesday that “maybe we were guilty of overoptimism” when engineers designed the Green Line and drew up its cost estimates.

For example, they initially had planned to spend only half as much on consultants for that line as they are spending on the Blue and Red lines. And although the Green Line runs through oil fields and former industrial zones, they were still surprised by the number of methane gas pockets and toxic waste pits that were discovered as they dug a 60-foot-deep foundation.

“We don’t schedule-in failure,” McSpedon said. “We assume a certain level of optimism.”

As expensive as those problems are, greater costs will arise in January, when a new design is chosen for a Green Line spur serving Los Angeles International Airport. It was ordered after the Federal Aviation Administration blasted the original proposal as a hazard to aircraft taking off and landing at the nation’s third-busiest airport.

A staff report made public Wednesday estimated that this new design, which most likely would place the line underground, will add as much as $167 million to the project.

Meanwhile, LACTC engineers conceded Wednesday that the Metro Blue Line is much noisier than allowed, confirming complaints of people who live and work along the county’s only operating rapid rail transit line.

The engineers have asked the LACTC to spend $495,000 to modify the line, including building freeway-style sound walls and replacing the horns on the entire 54-car Blue Line fleet.