Bid Process Halted as Airport Expansion Hits New Obstacle

The city’s beleaguered campaign to expand Los Angeles International Airport hit another snag this week when the officials who had requested bids to oversee the project’s next phase abruptly and indefinitely postponed the process on the advice of city lawyers .

Although airport officials insist that the move will not slow the overall project, others say that the latest development raises new questions about the expansion effort--one that has long been bedeviled by opposition and hamstrung by glitches and politics.

“I think the real question this raises is: ‘Are these the people you want to run the airports of the future?’ ” said Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who supports regional airport expansion but has been an ardent critic of the plan to massively expand Los Angeles International. “I really am disturbed to find that they would put something like this out there and then have to turn around and pull it back.”

Earlier this summer, Mayor Richard Riordan, concerned about the progress of the airport plan, ousted Dan Garcia, the well-regarded president of the Board of Airport Commissioners, and replaced him with John Agoglia, a businessman whom Riordan admires. In the ensuing controversy, the mayor was forced to drop another commissioner and a third resigned because he was moving to Sacramento.

The result was a thorough overhaul of the Airport Commission. Despite the turmoil, Riordan and mayoral aides hoped the change would breathe new life into the development of the so-called Master Plan for the airport, a document that is intended to guide the airport’s expansion from about 60 million passengers a year to nearly 100 million.

Now, however, critics say that those plans have been derailed again. After first drafting a request for proposals to oversee the next step in the expansion process, airport officials said they discovered unforeseen problems with their approach.

“Due to complicated issues regarding the federal conflict-of-interest rules, disclosure statement requirement provisions and proposal eligibility, the proposal submission due date for the Program Management Services RFP (request for proposals) is indefinitely postponed,” the Airport Department said in a memorandum dated Aug. 21.

According to a city lawyer and other sources familiar with the behind-the-scenes debate on the airport, officials were surprised to learn after requesting bids that they may not be allowed to hire any consultants who have worked on preparing the environmental analysis of the proposals to expand the airport. If so, that might preclude such experienced companies as Bechtel, which has just finished an airport project in Hong Kong--the largest such undertaking in history.

In essence, the potential for conflict is this: If a contractor, like Bechtel, is advising airport officials about the ramifications of expanding the airport while at the same time it is assured of overseeing the next phase of the expansion, it could taint the firm’s report. In other words, the company would be unlikely to highlight the environmental downsides of expansion if the same company were under contract to oversee that expansion.

“I don’t know why this went out when it did,” said Brett Lobner, a city attorney who advises the Airport Department. “But we do not want to have a flaw in our process that jeopardizes our environmental review.”

A top airport official agreed, and said the department wanted to take every precaution to protect the expansion plan from being subjected to challenge later.

Lobner stressed that the department’s decision to hold off on awarding the contract was merely temporary--although he could not predict how long the delay would be--and that other work on the master plan can continue in the meantime.

“There was no real emergency,” he said. “We were talking about a program manager, but there’s no program to manage.”

Riordan, who for years did little to intervene directly in the airport expansion effort but in recent months has monitored it much more closely, is out of town this week. But sources close to the mayor joined with Lobner in downplaying the seriousness of the reversal on the bids.

“I’m told [that this will] not” hold up the rest of the airport plans, one Riordan aide said. “The [environmental impact report] will not be held up because of this.”

Airport officials hope to complete the environmental analysis this fall.

Galanter, however, said those reassurances were not enough for her. She repeatedly criticized the airport management for moving ahead with the request for proposals, only to then have to pull back.

“There’s a sort of chronic question of who’s in charge over there,” she said.

Proponents say that airport expansion will create thousands of jobs and is key to the economic growth of Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California. Opponents argue that while regional airport growth is needed, the area around Los Angeles International is already overburdened with traffic, noise and pollution. They favor focusing on other Southern California airports.

If approved, the airport expansion is expected to rank as one of the most expensive public works projects in the nation. Estimates for the project range from $8 billion to $12 billion.