EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Council Pledges $10.9 Million for Coliseum Repair : Recovery: Funds come from first federal grants. City attorney is ordered to determine if anyone is liable for failing to relay a 1991 report that stadium was vulnerable to quake.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to allocate $10.9 million from the first $75 million in federal earthquake grants to the city to start repairing the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The vote came two days before an expected structural engineer’s report on the full extent of quake damage to the historic stadium.

At the same time, the council instructed City Atty. James K. Hahn to report on whether the Coliseum’s managers, the Spectacor Management Group, its architects or any other parties failed to comply with their responsibilities by failing to give the Coliseum Commission a 1991 report warning that the structure was vulnerable to a large earthquake.

The motion by Councilman Joel Wachs also instructed Hahn to advise the council on legal remedies it could pursue against any party he finds to have been negligent in the handling of the 1991 report.

No seismic retrofit was undertaken at the stadium between 1991 and the Northridge earthquake. Preliminary estimates are that the damage discovered so far in the Coliseum will cost $33 million to $35 million to repair.

The same structural engineer who warned of the quake danger in 1991, Nabib Youssef of Los Angeles, has been retained to give a more detailed report on the damage, probably by Friday.

As the first federal money was made available for repairs, the new Coliseum Commission president, Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, said the commission’s legal counsel has concluded that Coliseum authorities have no continuing contracts with architects or builders under which the work could be done.

Two firms--the Tutor-Saliba construction group and HNTB architects--completed a $15-million renovation of the stadium last year, lowering the playing field and adding thousands of new lower-level seats.

Burke said a normal bidding procedure, which would contain specifications for repair work, would take months, ruling out repair of the facility before the next football season. But she said the Coliseum Commission would meet in special session next week, in the wake of the engineer’s report, to consider two alternatives that might allow the Raiders and USC to play in the stadium this year.

One would be an abbreviated bidding process, she said, which might take as little as seven days. Architects and construction companies would be asked to bid only on a cost-plus-profit basis, with the plans and construction details to come later.

A second alternative would be “a finding by us that it is not in the interest of the Coliseum to put this out to bid,” she said. Under this emergency procedure, the commission would simply select a company to do the work.

“Detailed specifications are going to be impossible for us if we are going to get this done,” Burke said in an interview. “It’s highly unlikely we can use the usual procedures.”

Burke and the commission’s project manager, Don C. Webb, cited ongoing freeway reconstruction in the wake of the earthquake as an example of how a project can be designed and constructed simultaneously.

Neither Burke nor Webb said they knew precisely what would be in the engineer’s report expected Friday, but both expressed confidence the Coliseum could be reconstructed at an acceptable price, without substantial demolition first.