Air Conditioning Is a Hot Issue in L.A. Unified

A high-stakes competition for the contract to put air conditioning in hundreds of schools is creating growing discord among those in charge of Los Angeles’ massive school repair bond fund.

Amid escalating criticism from San Fernando Valley groups that the $2.4-billion construction project is lagging, key members of the bond oversight committee are at odds with each other and with school officials over such questions as how quickly contracts should be awarded and the ethics of lobbying by bidders.

Air conditioning makes up only a tenth of the work to be financed through Proposition BB, which was overwhelmingly approved by voters in April to repair sagging Los Angeles Unified School District campuses. But to some, the issue of how quickly air conditioning can be installed has become a symbol of the larger question of whether the long-beleaguered district can redeem itself in the eyes of a skeptical public.

Steven Soboroff, chairman of the oversight committee established by voters when they approved Proposition BB, is accusing school district officials of sabotaging outside bidders for the $200-million air-conditioning work because they want to keep it under their control.

Saying that nothing is more urgent than the relief of students in sweltering classrooms, Soboroff insists that one of the seven large energy and construction firms bidding on the air-conditioning work be chosen within days after the bidding period ends next month.

But a representative on the committee from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. said he is alarmed by the rush to name an air-conditioning contractor and believes that the bids raise questions that cannot be answered in the three-day evaluation Soboroff is advocating.

“Government is made to work slowly because taxpayers do get ripped off,” said David Barulich. “We’ve got $2.4 billion to make improvements that are going to be used for the next 20 years. If it has to wait 90 days, I’m not too worried.”

Mistrust escalated dramatically last week when an influential group of business people, the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., sent a sharply worded letter to Supt. Ruben Zacarias complaining of bureaucratic delay while children were suffering intolerable heat.

Former Assemblyman Richard Katz, who is now running for the state Senate, jumped in with an opinion piece in a local newspaper chastising the district for resisting entrepreneurial partnerships that could streamline its bureaucracy.

More pointedly, Soboroff said O’Brien Kreitzberg Inc., the Proposition BB management team hired by the district, should forfeit its role in supervising and contracting the air-conditioning work--even though that was part of its contract--because it did not submit a bid to counter several outside firms, which contend that they can do the work more quickly and cheaply.

The tensions have been building since the district received an unsolicited proposal in May from a consortium including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the parent company of The Gas Co. to install air conditioners in the roughly 300 schools that have not yet received it and supply their power and maintenance under a long-term contract.

Soboroff, a hard-driving businessman appointed to the committee by Mayor Richard Riordan, immediately gave his blessing to the proposal--which, in fact, he helped cultivate after learning that the district’s schedule would spread the air-conditioning installation over three years.

“These guys came in and said, ‘We can do this better,’ ” Soboroff said. “My words to them were, ‘You’re talking my language. Teach us. Teach me, teach the superintendent, teach the mayor,’ which they did.”

Soboroff said the group, called the Energy Alliance, convinced him that the district’s estimate of the time and cost of the air-conditioning work could be beaten by millions of dollars and that the maintenance was critical to the future performance.

“Right now, if you ask any principal, ‘What do you do?’ their janitors go up and fix them [air-conditioning units] with coat hangers,” Soboroff said. “It’s ridiculous.”

However, the district’s facilities director, Beth Louargand, reacted more coolly to the Energy Alliance proposal. She ruled that such a contract could not be awarded without competitive bidding.

While awaiting other proposals, the district continued to whittle away at the air conditioning the way it had always intended to, as part of the overall Proposition BB work. In June, it hired an overall program manager, O’Brien Kreitzberg Inc., and 10 regional project managers to marshal the architects and contractors for thousands of individual jobs in the massive construction program under Proposition BB, the nation’s largest school bond measure.

Louargand reported in midsummer that architects were working on 135 out of 320 schools that need air conditioning. By last week, 12 of the jobs had been completed and 40 more were going to bid, she said.

Meanwhile, Energy Alliance, in a high-pressure campaign to buttress its proposal, sent teams out to compile work plans for every school, at a cost estimated by Energy Alliance program manager Michael Dochterman at $400,000.

Dochterman reported in August that the alliance could do the work for $159 million--about $40 million below the district’s estimate--and in 14 months, about the time the district had allowed for completion of air conditioning in only 155 high-priority schools.

Energy Alliance, responding to criticism that its offer was an attempt to lock L.A. Unified into favorable rates at the onset of energy deregulation, also added an escape clause to release the district if it could get cheaper power.

By then, however, 10 other proposals were on the table, some seeking to do only a percentage of the schools or only the installation and others closely matching the alliance’s plan.

Soboroff clashed with Louargand during a bond oversight committee meeting in August when she insisted on allowing the new bidders equal time with the alliance to examine the schools, then set the period at 45 days rather than the 30 he favored.

Increasingly harping on the delays, Soboroff said he believes Louargand--in league with program manager Ruth Hobbs from O’Brien Kreitzberg Inc.--is trying to deflect all the outside bids, now honed down to seven, by moving forward with the work while coming up with a speedier and less costly plan.

Louargand denied any attempt to delay.

“No one in the district is doing anything to slow down the process,” Louargand said. “We want seven very good proposals to look at.”

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However, one of the district’s 10 Proposition BB project managers told The Times that Hobbs instructed him to give priority to air-conditioning jobs.

Soboroff’s suspicions boiled over last week when he learned that Louargand had sent board members a letter urging them to avoid conversations with the bidders because that might make the process look “political.”

Seeing the warning as an attempt to manage the information reaching the board, Soboroff countered by urging the board members to seek out the contractors.

“I say, ‘Talk to all of them,’ because it’s too big to try and digest by virtue of just seeing a staff report,” he said.

But Soboroff’s undisguised championing of the Energy Alliance proposal has put off Jarvis group representative Barulich, as did the appearance of Energy Alliance program manager Dochterman before the bond oversight committee in August.

Dochterman, accompanied by a public relations team, told the committee that every day it didn’t award the alliance the contract was adding a day to the students’ suffering.

“I don’t know if he knows anything about air conditioning, but he seems to know a lot about lobbying,” Barulich said.

Barulich said he is skeptical of the concept of putting the air-conditioning work on a fast track.

“I suspect that the real interest is political,” he said. “The Valley votes. Air conditioning is a very political issue. If you sort of centralize the AC project and attribute its getting done to particular individuals, there’s more to be gained by that.”