Glitch Raises Police Training Center’s Cost

Construction of a police training center here will cost an additional $450,000 due to unforeseen soil problems beneath a proposed drivers’ training course, city officials said Monday.

During excavation at the site, city workers found moist soil three feet below the surface, and engineers fear that a paved training course built on the soil would sink.

In response to an emergency request, the Board of Public Works voted Monday to increase the construction contract for the training center by $450,000 to $23 million.

The work is not expected to delay the April 1997 completion date.

To keep the drivers’ training track from sinking, city engineers have recommended compacting the moist soil and covering it with a liner of crushed concrete before adding the pavement.

The increased cost is the latest snag in the construction of the 44-acre facility at the base of the Van Norman Reservoir, where Los Angeles police plan to practice shooting and high-speed driving techniques.

The project, on land owned by the semiautonomous Department of Water and Power, had been delayed for more than a year because of a long-running debate between the City Council and the DWP over how much--if anything--the city should pay for the land.

After much acrimony, the council decided to pay a $1-a-year lease for the property despite the DWP’s contention that the property is worth $5 million.

The project was then delayed another three months due to a contract dispute between two firms that bid for the work.

During Monday’s Board of Public Works meeting, some members said the moist soil should not have been a surprise because the site was once a lake bottom.

City engineers explained that city workers used a boring machine to take 18 soil samples but did not discover the moisture problem because most of the samples were taken near the site of the indoor shooting facility.

“We are hoping this will be the end of this, but when you are excavating subsoil, you never know,” said Cell Chavez, a city engineer.

Public Works Commissioner Valerie Lynne Shaw questioned city engineers about why the soil conditions were not discovered sooner and called the result a “$450,000 boring mistake.”

Commission President J. P. Ellman agreed that the problem should have been discovered sooner.