Transit Commission to Help Minority Firms Seek Pacts

Prodded by Mayor Tom Bradley, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission adopted a formal policy Wednesday to help businesses owned by minorities and women compete more effectively for the commission’s substantial supply and construction contracts.

The new policy is similar to the federal “disadvantaged business enterprise” program, but will apply to projects that are built without federal aid. LACTC officials said projects built only with local and state tax money--such as the Metro Green Line--have not included a comparable effort to recruit women or minority contractors.

Informally, the LACTC board said it wanted to try to give about 15% of its non-federal business to minority-owned firms and another 5% to businesses owned and run by women. It also agreed to spend up to $105,000 to study discrimination in contract awards. If a discriminatory pattern is detected, the board could set formal goals for minority and women contractors.

Pending the results of the discrimination study, the LACTC has decided to bring more women- and minority-owned businesses into its list of suppliers by encouraging them to bid for work and helping them deal with the complexities of government contracting.

John W. Murray of the Rail Construction Corp., the LACTC’s track-building subsidiary, added that county transportation officials also can assist minority and women contractors by helping them obtain completion and performance bonds, making sure they are paid promptly and splitting large contracts into smaller chunks to make it easier for them to compete.

Some of these efforts have been made before, Murray said, but the program needs to be made a higher priority by LACTC management because many small-business owners said they still were reluctant to compete for commission contracts.

“They (women and minority contractors) see a lot of money going by,” Murray said, “but for whatever reason, they don’t feel they have an equal shot at it.”

The Century Freeway Affirmative Action Committee, which is approaching the end of its job in promoting participation by women and minority contractors in the nearly completed project, has expressed an interest in offering its experience to the LACTC.

But board members at the LACTC, which is coping with a budget shortfall and facing a merger with the Southern California Rapid Transit District, have repeatedly resisted attempts to hire additional staff.

In other action, the LACTC agreed to initiate an effort to get the California Air Resources Board to reconsider a new set of computer-generated pollution estimates indicating that one of the LACTC’s major goals--reduced freeway congestion--may actually make smog worse.

LACTC officials have dismissed that possibility, saying that congestion-fighting projects would significantly reduce the number of trips made in smog-producing cars by shifting commuters to electric-powered trains, clean-fuel buses and car pools.