County to Buy 15 Rail Cars From Sumitomo : Green Line: Transit panel returns to Japanese-owned firm despite uproar that canceled earlier contract.

Nine months after a political uproar over job exports forced it to cancel a contract to buy Metro Green Line cars from a Japanese-owned company, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission voted 9 to 0 on Monday to approve another purchase from the firm.

The LACTC agreed to buy 15 Blue Line-style rail cars from Sumitomo Corp. because it is unable to find anyone else to build cars to its specifications on its schedule. Another 85 more sophisticated cars are scheduled to be purchased next May under a separate contract. Officials expect that contract to attract at least four bidders.

The LACTC’s vote last December to award the original 41-car Green Line contract to Sumitomo, coming as the economy slumped and President Bush left on a fruitless trade mission to Japan, sparked a bitter national uproar over the export of jobs.

After a month of vitriolic criticism and demonstrations, which some people characterized as racist, the commission rescinded the Sumitomo contract and set out to redesign the project to bring more domestic contractors into the process.

The new cars will cost $2.9 million each--as much as the LACTC was willing to pay for a much more technologically advanced vehicle in January, and more than twice the $1.3 million it paid for the original, virtually identical Blue Line cars in 1985.

Neil Peterson, the commission’s executive director, said the higher cost is attributable chiefly to the small number of cars being ordered and the tight schedule demanded by the commission.

Two commissioners, Supervisor Deane Dana and James Tolbert, did not attend Monday’s meeting, but all other members supported the Sumitomo proposal.

More than 60% of the value of the Sumitomo vehicles will consist of components made in the United States, the LACTC said. The cars will be shipped semifinished from the Nagoya factory of Nippon Sharyo Ltd. and completed in Los Angeles. The LACTC estimates that the contract will create 79 jobs in Los Angeles County. The jobs will be scattered among 10 businesses owned by women or minorities.

Combined with eight spares borrowed from the Blue Line, the 15 new vehicles should let the commission open the Green Line in November, 1994, Peterson said.

Without this interim car order, the opening could be delayed by a year--leaving the LACTC in what some members have conceded would be the embarrassing position of owning a billion-dollar railroad without any cars to run on it.

The interim order also gives the LACTC another 18 months to help some contractor develop a standardized car that would run on all of the county’s proposed light-rail lines and help nurture the development of an advanced transportation industry in Southern California--a process that shows promising signs of bearing jobs.

Ed McSpedon, president of the LACTC’s Rail Construction Corp. subsidiary, said that seven companies have expressed an interest in the 85-car order. Bids on that order were due at the end of next week, but the deadline has been extended to Dec. 1.

The extension was granted at the unanimous request of the bidders, McSpedon said. The firms said that the complexity of the project--which encourages bidders to team with as many local companies as possible and propose technological innovations in rail-car construction--is taking longer than anticipated.

As scheduled now, the 15 interim cars--virtually identical to those operating successfully on the Blue Line--would begin to arrive in Los Angeles for testing in May, 1994, and be placed in service that November.

Next May, the transportation commission is scheduled to select a contractor to build the 85 light-rail cars. Those cars would be delivered in September, 1995. Besides the Green Line, the new cars would be used on a proposed light-rail line from downtown to Pasadena and on a third line that has yet to be selected by the LACTC.

Peterson said that he expects these cars to cost between $2.3 million to $2.7 million each. At the height of the controversy last January, he had predicted that standardization would drive down the cost of cars to about $2 million apiece.

During this larger production run, the contractor would construct two additional rail cars, which would be used as real-life test beds for the technological innovations that, in theory, the prime contractor will develop with local aerospace, electronic and other high-tech firms.

If the innovations prove feasible, Peterson and other LACTC officials said the new products could then be marketed to other transit systems, creating a stable new industry in Southern California.

The decision to buy new cars from Sumitomo instead of leasing a like number of incompatible cars from Sacramento-based Siemans-Duewag, a German-owned company, was made with only one board member so much as whispering what one critic called “the ‘S’ word”--Sumitomo.

Documents listing the pros and cons of each company’s proposal were only titled “Option 1” and “Option 2,” without reference to which company would perform either. Peterson said there was no intent to mask Sumitomo’s involvement.

“It was not a battle between Sumitomo and Siemens,” he said. “It was an issue of whether we should lease new cars or buy more Blue Line cars.”