Queen Mary’s Future Awaits Cost Analysis by Consultant : Tourism: Employees of the troubled seaside attraction ask the city to save their jobs.

Miguel Olmedo, a cook on the Queen Mary, sat quietly in the back of the City Council chambers Tuesday while a union representative presented city leaders with a petition asking them to save the old ocean liner--and Olmedo’s job.

He has prepared meals in the ship’s Sir Winston’s restaurant for seven years, and now Olmedo wavers between optimism and despair. One moment he expresses hope that the landmark tourist attraction will be spared. The next minute he predicts that he and the 1,100 other Queen Mary workers will be out of a job by the end of the year.

“I assume it will be closed. Everybody will be in unemployment lines,” said Olmedo, one of about 25 Queen Mary employees who attended the council meeting.

Bud Rymer, the United Industrial Workers executive who helped collect 3,000 signatures on the petition, also has his doubts. Privately, he said he suspects “we are just spinning our wheels. Minds are made up, and they’re going to close it.”

Long Beach officials insist the fate of the ocean liner is not yet decided. “If there’s a realistic opportunity to save (it), to maintain the Queen in some rational way, we will do that,” Councilman Evan Anderson Braude assured the audience.

But recent estimates that it may cost the city’s Harbor Department $1 million to $2 million a month to keep the city-owned attraction open indicated that the floating hotel’s days may be numbered.

The figures came from the Walt Disney Co., which is dropping its lease on the ship and the adjacent Spruce Goose attraction at the end of September. Disney has offered to continue managing the landmarks while the city figures out what to do with them, provided that the city pays all expenses.

Before local officials can decide the liner’s future, they say they need to confirm the operating costs and get advice from consultants. Three teams of consultants are being interviewed this week, and Harbor Planning Director Geraldine Knatz said that one will likely be selected by Friday to conduct an economic analysis of the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ “Flying Boat.”

Not only will the consultants review the costs of continuing to operate the Queen Mary as a hotel, they will examine the expense of converting the ship into some other type of attraction, such as a museum. The team will be asked to report its findings in two months.

Harbor officials expect to hire another consulting group in May to study development possibilities for about 250 acres of land, above and below water, that surround the Queen Mary.

Potential developers have expressed “a substantial amount of interest” in the site, City Manager James C. Hankla told the council, adding that no proposals will be evaluated until the consultant reports have been completed.

One businessman showed up at the council meeting to emphasize that “there is a tremendous amount of support for a theme park anchored by the Queen Mary.” Ted L. Sanborn, president of United Peoples Companies Inc., a consulting and development firm, later said he has been approached by several investors interested in the site. But he complained that he has received no response from either the mayor’s office or the port to the letter of inquiry he sent about a month ago. “That amazes me,” he said.

The selection of a consultant has sparked complaints from Councilman Warren Harwood, who contends that the effort is moving too slowly and seems stacked against the Queen Mary. “They’re trying to scuttle it. They can’t fool me,” Harwood declared this week, referring to the Harbor Commission. A panel of five appointed by the mayor to oversee the harbor operation, the commission is the target of frequent criticism by Harwood.

Steve R. Dillenbeck, executive director of the Harbor Department, acknowledged that hiring consultants “has not gone as fast as we had hoped it would.” He declined to elaborate. Knatz said officials had at first expected to hire one team, rather than two, and had planned to pick a consultant group without soliciting proposals from a variety of firms, as they wound up doing.

“It just takes time to put it all together,” said Harbor Commission President Joel Friedland. “There hasn’t been any foot-dragging.”