Directory Lists Local Firms for Transit Project Work : Employment: County Transportation Commission hopes its publication will create jobs. Five hundred companies are listed.

In an effort to spend more of its budget locally, thus creating jobs at home, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission today is scheduled to release a directory of 500 local companies that could provide goods or services useful to LACTC contractors.

The agency cannot hire many of the firms itself but assembled the list to make it easier for bidders on its major contracts to include as many local subcontractors and suppliers as possible in their proposals.

Federal law forbids the LACTC to explicitly demand that contractors use local suppliers, said consultant David Friedman, but potential bidders know there is so much political pressure to create jobs that using local subcontractors may be decisive in closely contested contracts.

The 91-page “Products and Services Directory” is part of a wider LACTC campaign to nurture an advanced transportation industry in Southern California. The LACTC also supports CALSTART, the Burbank-based consortium that won a $4-million U.S. Department of Transportation grant Monday to develop prototypes for an electric car and electric bus.

The LACTC assumed the task of helping build a transportation industry after it was severely criticized earlier this year for awarding a large Metro Green Line car-building contract to a foreign company at a time of high local unemployment. The contract was canceled after a public uproar.

“The directory is just the beginning of a process to establish Los Angeles as a worldwide supplier of rail systems,” said LACTC board member Nikolas Patsaouras. “The advanced technology developed by the aerospace and defense industries makes Los Angeles a natural place to create a surface transportation industry.”

Classifying companies by the products and services they sell--from abrasives to wrenches and assembly to vibration testing--the directory is only one way in which the LACTC is trying to sell local firms to international contractors.

LACTC Executive Director Neil Peterson said the commission also plans an all-day workshop Sept. 10 at which it plans to introduce local companies to major car-builders. The LACTC also will directly encourage contractors to take advantage of the region’s resources.

“There is still a large manufacturing base here,” said Friedman, a lawyer and economist who works for the Los Angeles law firm of Tuttle & Taylor.

“Everybody’s so busy focusing on the loss of large aerospace companies that they have forgotten the fact that the bulk of aerospace work was job-shopped--spread around to a lot of small shops throughout the region,” Peterson said. “There is still plenty of manufacturing capability in this area, we just had to go out and find them.”

Companies in the directory range from such giants as Litton Industries and TRW, which have tens of thousands of employees, to small businesses such as Genlight Inc. of Sun Valley and Swissomatic Products of Chatsworth, each of which has two employees.

Also included are such aerospace titans as Northrop Corp. and Rockwell International.

Most companies, however, range in size from 10 to 100 employees and offer such specialized products and services as “rectifiers,” “gear hobs” and “vacuum brazing.”

Harry P. Ross, vice president of one of these mid-size companies, Power Energy Industries of Carson, was hopeful but cautious about the program.

“Somebody has a good idea here, but they really have to sell this to the contractors,” he said. “I don’t think this is going to fly very much unless there is some pressure brought on the (prime) contractors.”

Ironically, the company at the heart of the controversy that has fueled the “buy local” effort, Sumitomo Corp., may yet supply at least some cars for the Green Line.

Cancellation of the original Sumitomo contract in January put the car-building part of the Green Line project months behind schedule. To avoid having an $800-million train line with no trains to run on it, the LACTC decided to try to buy 15 off-the-shelf streetcars to run on the Green Line starting in 1994. Its custom-made cars are not scheduled to arrive until some months later.

Sumitomo and German-owned Siemens-Duewag are the only companies that have shown interest in providing the 15 temporary cars.