Council May Link New Contracts to Creating Jobs : Government: Firms bidding to make plastic garbage cans may be required to build a plant in South L.A. Proposed law would be test of ‘buy American’ charter change.

Firms seeking $42 million in city contracts for plastic garbage containers would be encouraged to build a manufacturing plant in South Los Angeles under a proposal being crafted as the first test of the city’s new “buy American” law.

Councilwoman Rita Walters on Tuesday asked the city attorney to determine whether the recently passed Charter Amendment G can be tailored to require building of such a plant.

Walters said it could create jobs in a section of the city that sorely needs them.

“I’d like to see this proposal enacted by the (City) Council within a month,” Walters said. “And South Los Angeles is the perfect place for it--it has the highest unemployment, the highest homeless population and the highest amount of damage from civil disturbances.”

The City Council’s Public Works Committee will hold a special public hearing on Walters’ proposal next Wednesday.

Charter Amendment G, which is expected to be certified by the end of the month, will give California and Los Angeles County firms preference in bidding on city contracts, and establish a minimum domestic content level for city purchases.

City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who authored the charter amendment, has asked the city attorney to draft an ordinance that will enable the City Council to favor local firms bidding on city contracts.

However, it could take several months for the council to enact that ordinance.

So Walters is seeking quick approval of a similar but separate ordinance providing a bidding preference of 10% to a firm that would produce up to 600,000 of the 60-gallon plastic containers in her 9th District, which suffered $200 million in structural damage during the Los Angeles riots.

The containers will be distributed to residents for use in the city’s automated collection program for refuse and yard trimmings, city officials said.

The city holds five contracts for such containers--none with a Los Angeles County-based firm. Walters said she is seeking emergency action on her proposal because the five contracts begin expiring in July and “the community is desperate” for new jobs.

Still to be hammered out is whether to restrict the bidding process to the firms that produce waste containers for the city, or to open up the bidding to newcomers as well.

“We want the City Council to adopt legislation that would fine-tune the charter amendment to allow for bid preferences within the city itself,” said Howard Gantman, an aide to Walters. “We also want a significant bid preference to encourage one of these firms to make garbage cans locally.”

Walters’ plan has garnered some bureaucratic support.

In a preliminary report on the proposal released Tuesday, the city’s Bureau of Sanitation recommended that the ordinance provide a 10% bidding preference for firms producing containers in an undetermined riot-torn portion of the city.

The report also recommended requiring bidders to identify the number of new jobs a city-based facility would generate, and what actions would be taken to ensure the hiring of employees from the immediate area.

“I think it is a great idea,” said Drew Sones, manager of the recycling and waste reduction division of the Department of Public Works.

“A plant like this could create up to 120 new jobs,” Sones said, “and it would be environmentally clean because it would only require that plastic molding machines be trucked into a vacant warehouse.”

Yaroslavsky agreed, with reservations.

“We have to be careful and proceed with caution to do it right, but this (proposal) is a good place to start,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s a big contract which involves the manufacturing of a product we’ll be buying a lot of.”