Council to Consider Private Firms for Quake Debris Removal : Recovery: Action to ask for bids is proposed by Hal Bernson and Richard Alarcon. They complain the city’s program is not working fast enough.

Three months after the city charged its own workers with managing the earthquake cleanup program, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to consider using private firms to help oversee the demolition and debris removal program.

The action to ask firms to submit bids was proposed by Councilmen Hal Bernson and Richard Alarcon who complained that the city’s program is not working fast enough to clear the city streets of quake debris.

The bids are also intended to answer a question that several council members have been asking since the city’s cleanup program began: Can private firms do the job more efficiently than the city?

Alarcon, who represents parts of the northeast San Fernando Valley, said the council’s vote does not mean the city will hand over the entire cleanup program to private firms but he said he still hopes the city will study that option.

“At least now we can look our constituents in the face and say we tried to find the best way,” he said.

But other council members argued that the city’s management of the cleanup program has gone well and does not need outside help.

“I haven’t seen any evidence that this program is failing,” said Councilman Marvin Braude, who joined Councilwoman Rita Walters in opposing the move to seek competitive bids.

In February, the council voted to support Mayor Richard Riordan’s recommendation to shift 79 workers from the city’s Bureau of Engineering over to a new Earthquake Recovery Division. That unit was charged with overseeing demolition of up to 1,000 buildings and the removal of about 400,000 tons of debris from the Jan. 17 quake.

The council approved the mayor’s plan after city Public Works officials estimated that city workers could do the work more cheaply than private firms because it had lower overhead costs and would not factor in a 10% profit margin as private firms would.

But even at that time, opponents of the mayor’s plan argued that city officials had simply estimated what the private contractors would charge, instead of allowing the companies to submit their own bids.

So far, the city has completed about 15% of the demolition work and 20% of the cleanup. Beginning last month, the city had 104 crews--each with two trucks and a skip loader--clearing 10,000 tons of debris per day. All the crews come from private companies, but all are managed by the the city’s Earthquake Recovery Division.

But Alarcon and Bernson said the piles of rubble they have seen in streets in their districts indicate that the cleanup program is not working fast enough.

“You are not doing a good job in my district,” Bernson told Public Works officials at Tuesday’s council meeting.

It was Alarcon who first asked that private firms submit competitive bids to on the cost of taking over the remainder of the cleanup program. But Bernson amended that motion, asking that the firms only submit bids for the cost of adding privately managed crews to the city’s program.

The competitive bids are due back to the City Council by May 13.

Charles Dickerson III, president of the Public Works Commission, said the city’s program had slowed down last month because of a temporary funding shortage. But overall, he said, “We think we are doing a very good job.”

In an interview after the meeting, Andres Santamaria, manager of the city’s cleanup program, said piles of debris are still seen throughout the city because residents are not calling the city to request cleanup. The city’s cleanup request line is (800) 498-CITY.

He said the cleanup crews only respond to requests because it would be too expensive to pay the crews to patrol neighborhoods in search of rubble.

“We just can’t let them roam the streets at $500 an hour,” Santamaria said.

Santamaria maintains that adding crews managed by private firms might actually increase the cost of the program because city crews could end up sitting idle.