Council Accepts City Workers’ Proposal to Do Maintenance Job

City blue-collar employees won a key battle in the fight over contracting on Tuesday when the Los Angeles City Council decided to keep a chunk of maintenance work in-house.

The 11-0 vote to accept the employees’ proposal for taking care of the LAPD’s Westchester training academy came despite the objections of the businessman who earlier had won a bid for part of the work.

Walter Prince, president of the Northridge-based Executive Suites janitorial services company, said that snubbing his firm was neither fair nor economical. He questioned the veracity of city claims that the workers’ proposal was comparable to the bids made by himself and low bidders for other segments of the work.

But Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg said the city, in soliciting private bids more than a year ago, had failed to follow its own relatively new policy of giving city service employees a chance to come up with their own proposals before work is turned over to private contractors.

Mayor Richard Riordan, who can sign or veto the measure or let it become law without his signature, has not yet decided what to do, a spokeswoman said.