Rail Car Bidding Plan Aims at U.S. Factories : Green Line: It will require that most cars be built domestically, and encourage team efforts to create new jobs in the area in the growing field of transit manufacturing.

Still smarting from a political beating over the selection in December of a foreign firm to build Metro Green Line cars, local transit officials Wednesday cobbled together a plan to reopen bidding in a way designed to interest more companies with factories in the United States.

Later, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission board members also decided to keep the Green Line’s original driverless train controls, which had been blamed for running up costs and contributing to the selection of foreign train-car builders.

The car-procurement process will mandate that most of the car construction be done domestically and will encourage bidders to do at least 15% of the work in California and 10% in Los Angeles County, even if that increases costs.

It also includes a “prototype program” to encourage bidders to team with Los Angeles County firms, from aerospace giants to entrepreneurs, to foster creation of new local jobs in the growing transportation-manufacturing field.

Potential car-builders--all but one of them foreign-owned, though most have factories in the United States--have been eyeing the Green Line job cautiously, balancing their hunger for a $200-million-plus contract with the politically charged atmosphere in which the contract would be awarded.

The LACTC is trying to find a car design similar to that of the popular Metro Blue Line car. They are looking for a flexible and cheap car that is loaded up with domestic components, and they want its design to foster development of local companies interested in getting into the growing transportation-manufacturing field.

It has not been an easy task.

Making it harder has been the LACTC’s effort to find some cars it can lease so that the Green Line can be started as soon as possible--to avoid the potentially embarrassing situation of having a very expensive, fully operational railroad that it cannot use because it has no cars.

For a while, it looked as if some cars could be leased from St. Louis, but St. Louis could not guarantee that it would ever want them back.

Buying more Blue Line cars also has been suggested, but the county counsel said that would require an illegal purchase from the original Blue Line car manufacturer. That manufacturer was Sumitomo Corp., the foreign-owned firm at the heart of January’s nasty dust-up.

At the same time, other potential bidders complain that any such lease or purchase would give the chosen company an insurmountable advantage in winning the entire 100-car purchase.

LACTC officials deny this, but they must contend with the possibility that such sentiments could discourage potential bidders. That would put them back where they were before: with few bidders, most of them foreign, and high bids because of the lack of competition.

Some potential bidders at Wednesday’s meeting said privately that they had serious doubts about the commission’s expedited schedule for buying Green Line cars. They warned that the schedule, which gives industry one week to comment on preliminary design and one month to develop bids, will increase the risk of shoddy work or delays and overruns in contract execution.

The schedule was developed by the Rail Construction Corp., the commission’s rail-building subsidiary. RCC board member Robert Kruse acknowledged that the schedule “leaves very little evaluation time in the process,” but he said it is workable.

The basic plan is to buy 102 standardized light-rail cars, which would be designed to run on all of the county’s light-rail, or trolley, lines. The LACTC originally intended to buy several different kinds of cars.

Actual design of the cars would be left largely to the bidders, as long as the cars meet some basic requirements. They must, for example, fit Green Line stations and tracks, be light enough for its bridges, be compatible with Blue Line cars and have alternating-current motors.

LACTC officials hope that these loose design standards, called performance specifications, will attract more bidders by making it easier to bid. That, in turn, is expected to lower costs and encourage bidders to compete in the creation of more local jobs.

Each bid will be judged in terms of how many local jobs it creates. Another factor will be the quality of the bidder’s plan to investigate the application of aerospace and other advanced technology to rail-transit vehicles.

“The whole goal is to get aerospace companies, which we assume are local, involved in this process,” Kruse said.

Two of the 102 cars would be stripped-down versions made available under the prototype program to local companies. The cars would be used to test new propulsion, braking and control systems, as well as other products they may develop.

While those tests are done, 52 regular production cars would be delivered to let the LACTC start service on the Green Line and a Blue Line extension to Pasadena. Limited, initial service is scheduled to start on the Green Line in 1995; the Pasadena line in 1996.

The last 48 cars could be modified to accommodate new products developed in the prototype program, thus giving local companies an “instant market” to let them prove the value of their products to other potential buyers around the world.

The commission also plans to encourage bidders to deliver at least 12 cars in time to meet the Green Line’s original November, 1994, start-up date. Since the standardized cars could not be ready that soon, LACTC officials said they may buy off-the-shelf cars that would have to be altered later to conform to the rest of the fleet.

Representatives of one potential bidder, Morrison Knudsen Corp., have said that process would not be necessary if the commission would summarily award both the car and train-control contracts to Morrison Knudsen without competitive bidding.

That offer was dismissed by commission members as unfair to other bidders and probably illegal, while several other companies attacked the proposal as unrealistic.