Key Subway Engineer Is Ousted : Transit: Designer lacks license from state. He helped approve plans that led to sinkhole problems on Hollywood Boulevard.

An engineer who played a key role in approving the ill-fated plans that led to the Hollywood Boulevard sinkhole disaster four months ago has never been licensed to practice engineering in California and is now being removed from the job, records and interviews show.

And at least three other engineers who played active though lesser planning roles on aspects of the trouble-plagued project are not licensed by the state, records show.

Subway officials maintain that the engineers were well qualified to do design work on the Los Angeles subway, but disclosure of their status with the state licensing board threatens to revive credibility questions that have dogged the professional staff on the troubled $5.8-billion project for more than a year after a series of design snafus.

“If we have people that don’t have [state engineering] licenses, and they’ve had time to get it and don’t do it, that really displeases me,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority board member James Cragin said.

A member of the MTA’s construction committee, Cragin said he wants the agency to certify the licensing status of all engineers on the troubled rail project--and to follow up by reviewing the engineering work done by anyone not licensed in California.

The issue of whether the MTA is improperly using unlicensed engineers comes at a time when the agency is already grappling with broader questions about the quality of hundreds of millions of dollars in design work for the mammoth subway project.

An independent report released last week concluded that faulty and “unrealistic” design work triggered the June 22 sinkhole that swallowed an 80-foot-wide swath of Hollywood Boulevard as up to 20 workers scrambled to escape. The sinkhole has meant months in delays and more than $6 million in damages for the project, and it has given new ammunition to critics who want to pull the plug on the subway.

County Supervisor Gloria Molina is proposing a motion at today’s MTA board meeting to study ways of bringing more “accountability and competition” to the design work for the planned extension of the Red Line subway into East Los Angeles. But opponents are pushing to move ahead with the award of up to $4 million in design work to subcontractors of Engineering Management Consultants (EMC), which has had an exclusive hold on subway design work.

MTA officials say EMC’s chief tunnel engineer, Timothy J. Smirnoff, ultimately approved the plans last year to remine the subway under Hollywood Boulevard--although analysts concluded last week that there was insufficient support for the water-soaked ground. Crews need to reroute one tunnel stretch because alignment was off by up to 18 inches.

In a memo dated March 17, 1994, Smirnoff offered the construction manager a range of design specifications that should be met before the remining plan could be approved. The plan was later adopted, but sources said some of the needed design steps--including the calculation of “bearing capacities” to ensure that the tunnel could support the load--do not appear to have been adequately carried out.

At the directive of the transit agency, EMC is removing Smirnoff from the job, said Norman E. Ross Jr., vice president of EMC’s principal partner, Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas. The firm notified the MTA of the move in a letter dated Monday.

EMC says it is not to blame for the design problems because its engineers were never told that there had been a significant rise in the ground-water level in the remining area. But the firm is complying with the MTA directive to remove Smirnoff, Ross said, because “he was the one who had oversight responsibility for the approval of the contractor’s plans.”

Smirnoff declined to discuss details of the case Tuesday but said in a brief interview that he is licensed to practice engineering in about a dozen states. He is not licensed, however, in California--which requires different standards than most states for certifying competence in seismic and surveying issues. Smirnoff applied for his state license last year but has to retake one portion of the state exam on surveying in March, 1996, because he didn’t pass it the first time, he said. Smirnoff is now on medical leave from work.

Stanley Phernambucq, MTA construction chief, said in an interview that he believes that Smirnoff clearly should have been licensed in California to make the engineering decisions that he did on the remining project. “The guy that’s signing off on our [design] documents should be a professional engineer in the state of California,” he said.

Less clear, however, are the requirements on the many other professionally trained engineers who make regular decisions on the subway project.

Contractors argue that most of those engineers fall outside state licensing restrictions because an exemption allows them to report to licensed engineers. But critics say the lines of authority on the rail project are so diffused that many unlicensed engineers--with key decision-making authority--are illegally practicing civil engineering under the law.

The situation at the MTA is so complicated that even the state Board of Registration for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors, which is charged with overseeing such matters, could not offer a clear-cut opinion. In a letter earlier this year, the board said that while Parsons-Dillingham’s contract as written did not appear to require licensing for its engineers, “the contract could be interpreted and fulfilled in such a way that would require registration.”

Controversy over the licensing issue at the MTA began last year when The Times disclosed that both Smirnoff and an engineer for construction manager Parsons-Dillingham, Stephen J. Navin, had approved a controversial redesign plan on an earlier stretch of Hollywood Boulevard--even though neither was licensed to practice in California.

The two engineers had allowed the substitution of wooden wedges for steel braces along some portions of the tunnel. Studies later showed that the redesign contributed to ground sinkages of up to 10 inches along Hollywood Boulevard.

Navin, the second engineer involved in the controversy last year, played a part in the plans that led to the sinkhole, records show.

Navin was serving as resident engineer for the construction manager in early 1994, and drawings and calculations on the remining plans were directed to his attention. He has since been transferred off the subway project and was not available for comment Tuesday. Officials at Parsons-Dillingham said they do not believe that engineers working under their contract require state licensing.

In addition, officials of the tunneling contractor that executed the remining plan--Shea-Kiewit-Kenny, now fired from the project--said that neither of the company’s two engineers who acted as project managers was licensed by the state.

Documents show that Shea’s project managers reviewed and in some cases authored memos with specific recommendations on design work for the remining operation, but company Vice President Peter Shea said he does not believe that alone requires that they be licensed as engineers.

“We’re contractors, we’re not designers. When you get into these complicated design problems, it’s a team of people doing the work anyway,” said Shea. He blamed the sinkhole on the MTA’s insistence that the contractor realign the tunnel route--and withstand the risks associated with that process--rather than allowing it to stand as it was.