Pact Signed to Sell Todd Shipyard Assets : Harbor: The City Council temporarily blocks the move, but firms interested in the 110-acre site fail to post the required deposit of $75,000 to open negotiations.

In an eleventh-hour bid to revive a once-bustling port facility, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to temporarily block the city’s Harbor Commission from selling the assets of the old Todd Shipyard in San Pedro.

But the effect of the council’s decision was unclear late Tuesday when several companies considering the 110-acre site all failed to post a required deposit with the port. The failure to deposit the non-refundable $75,000 by 5 p.m. led the port’s executive director, Ezunial Burts, to sign a contract selling the shipyard’s assets for $5.8 million to B & B Contractors of Seattle.

After Burts’ action, an official of one company interested in the site declared that the long effort to bring a new shipyard to the property had been dashed. “It’s gone,” said John Chernesky, general manager of the Los Angeles Shipyard Corp.

William Trejo, a shipworkers union official backing another company’s interest, criticized Burts’ action. “From the get-go, the harbor department never wanted a new shipyard in there,” Trejo said.

At issue Tuesday was whether the council should invoke a rarely used City Charter provision to intervene in the Harbor Commission’s recent decision to sell the site’s assets, which range from cranes to office equipment. That decision came after more than two years of unsuccessful talks between port officials and several start-up companies hoping to win a lease on the former Todd property.

The motion to intervene was made by harbor-area Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who persuaded colleagues to place a 90-day delay on the sale of the assets, as long as any company interested in the site posted a good-faith deposit of $75,000 on Tuesday.

During a council hearing on the matter Tuesday, Burts and other port officials told the council that efforts to reopen the site as a shipyard have been foiled by the inability of the competing companies to prove their financial viability. That argument was echoed by City Hall staffers who reviewed the port’s handling of the site.

But representatives of at least two companies bidding for the site countered that port officials had set unreasonable financial demands for a lease. And those representatives, including several former city officials, argued that the council must step in to bring new jobs to the shipyard.

“The question for this city is whether you are going to support a new renter there, whether you want to restore jobs, even if it means canceling the bid” for sale of the assets, said former Los Angeles City Atty. Burt Pines. He represents an investor in Los Angeles Shipyard Corp., a company with several former Todd management employees.

Similar concern over the port’s financial requirements were voiced by officials of Los Angeles-Long Beach Shipyards Inc. That company, also an upstart venture, has the backing of many former Todd workers who have invested about $350,000 in its proposal.

Despite fairly broad council support for a new shipyard at the site, many council members voiced skepticism about those proposals. And heeding the advice of port officials, a handful backed Council President John Ferraro’s plan to require any shipyard bidding for the site to pay the port up to $1 million if the proposal failed and the assets had to be sold.

At the urging of Flores, however, a majority of the council rejected that approach, agreeing with her that the requirement would repel the prospective shipyard tenants.

Under the plan approved by the council, bidders for the site must post a non-refundable $75,000 deposit with the city to open talks on a lease. The city and prospective tenants will then have three months to work out an agreement or rebid the assets for sale.