Earthquake: The Long Road Back : Council Argues Over Coliseum Contract

Awarding a Coliseum repair contract to the Tutor-Saliba construction company without bids or a precise price tag ignited heated controversy Tuesday in the Los Angeles City Council, but an effort to get an immediate hearing on the issue fell one vote short.

“What they’ve done is issue a blank check to a company which knows how to use blank checks,” Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said. “If it turns out it’s a $300-million job, the commissioners’ ideas on what to do may change.”

Councilman Nate Holden wrote the resolution urging the Coliseum Commission to reconsider its position and put the project out to a 10-day bidding process. At one point, he had secured 13 signatures for the resolution among the 15 council members.

The Coliseum is owned by the city, county and state. The City Council has no authority to override decisions by the Coliseum Commission.

Holden and colleague Joel Wachs said Tutor-Saliba has a reputation for cost overruns, and they noted that its performance in building Metro Rail has become a subject of investigation.

But when the Holden resolution came up for consideration, City Council President John Ferraro, who had been one of six Coliseum commissioners to vote to give the job to Tutor-Saliba on Monday, opposed bringing up the subject. He said Holden had been discourteous by not telling him what he intended to do.

Ferraro called a vote on whether to hear the matter, and Holden fell one vote short of the 10 votes necessary to bring it up off the regular agenda. Two members who had signed the Holden resolution, Laura Chick and Mike Hernandez, had left the meeting by that time, and two others, Marvin Braude and Ruth Galanter, switched positions to join Ferraro in blocking discussion.

Braude said he had signed the Holden resolution without “really reading it.” He added, “I thought it was ‘Motherhood,’ and it wasn’t.”

Holden, an alternate on the Coliseum Commission, said later that he had asked officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state Office of Emergency Services to tell the commission they would not give repair money without further assurances of the extent of the damage and the validity of repair contracts.

Tutor-Saliba has drawn scrutiny for its construction of portions of the Metro Rail subway Downtown. Over the last five months, federal authorities and a panel of three appointees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have examined the company’s construction of 1.8 miles of twin tunnels linking Union Station and Pershing Square.

The investigations followed a Times article in August reporting that numerous sections of those tunnels were built with concrete thinner than the design-specified thickness of 12 inches. The MTA panel is expected to report its findings sometime this month. Tutor-Saliba executives have said that any deficiencies resulted from construction mistakes.

As planning for the Coliseum repair project on a 24-hour-a-day emergency basis got under way Tuesday, the commission president and the only member to vote against awarding the repair contract without bid, Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, said she found the no-bid decision “very strange.”

Burke said that she was “under no illusion that the outcome of a bidding process would have been any different” in light of the Coliseum Commission’s long, cordial relationship with Tutor-Saliba and the fact that most commissioners wanted the firm.

But, she added, she had felt that a bidding process of seven days, similar to the emergency procedures Caltrans has used in hiring contractors for freeway repairs, would have at least brought the commission much useful information as to what various parties thought about the repair job, and might have given the commission more leverage over costs.

Now, she said, she hopes that a four-member earthquake construction committee she has appointed to monitor the work will deal with the firm on an “arms-length basis,” or, she warned: “We could end up with obligations that are just ill-defined.”

Sheldon Sloan, one of the commissioners who voted to proceed without a bid, defended the decision Tuesday as the best solution under circumstances of having to get the stadium ready for the next football season in less than 200 days.

Sloan said any kind of bidding process would have delayed the work by three to four weeks.

Tutor-Saliba, Sloan said, completed a $15-million renovation at the Coliseum last summer. “They came in on time or early,” he said. “They came in under budget and they did better than the minimal compliance with the contract terms . . . and they know the building backward and forward.”

In an interview Tuesday, Nabib Youssef, the principal structural engineer who has been retained to assess the Coliseum damage, said he believes that by the end of the first week in March all the quake damage will be fully assessed, including the condition of the earth berm on which the stadium is built.

“We are committed to the season opening,” Youssef said. “With the start we have, we are very comfortable with that.”