City Awards Contract for 911 Centers in West Hills, Downtown

Bowing to pressure from Mayor Richard Riordan, city officials awarded a $37.7-million contract Wednesday for new 911 centers in downtown Los Angeles and West Hills, projects approved by voters nearly seven years ago.

Tutor Saliba Corp. of Sylmar, which turned in the lowest of three bids, was picked and plans to begin construction in a few weeks on the newly expedited project.

Some 8,400 callers to 911 hang up each month because operators cannot get to them quickly enough, according to LAPD Capt. Mike Downing. About 87% of the calls are answered within 10 seconds.

Ellen Stein president of the city Public Works Board, said her panel acted after Riordan demanded to end delays in the project, which has been called important for public safety.

“This is something the voters have voted on,” Stein said. “There is an established need for this. Our concern was that to continue to delay it, from the information we had gathered, would mean additional cost.”

Paul Cauley, the acting city administrative officer, had asked for a couple more weeks to complete a study into whether the city could save up to $8 million by locating the San Fernando Valley 911 center at the Department of Water and Power’s partially vacant office building in Sun Valley.

Cauley was asked by City Council members last year to determine whether the approximately $20 million cost of the Valley 911 center could be reduced if it were located in the existing Anthony Office Building owned by DWP.

“I suppose [board action] makes the study moot regarding the 911 facility, but we are still studying the use of the Anthony Office Building for other city facilities,” Cauley said after the vote.

There still may be a slim chance to revisit the project, according to state Sen. Richard Alarcon, who was a City Council member last year when he and Councilman Joel Wachs called for the study.

“I would have preferred that they had waited to see if it could save taxpayers $8 million,” Alarcon said. “If the study shows that they could save $8 million, the City Council and mayor should reconsider it.”

Riordan has no plans to revisit the issue, according to spokeswoman Jessica Copen.

“No more delays,” she said.

The mayor believes any potential savings in moving the project to Sun Valley would be outweighed by additional costs of delaying construction, redesigning the dispatch center for a new site and retrofitting the DWP building to withstand major earthquakes.

In addition, the city might lose some of the money it spent to buy the former Hughes Missile Systems property in West Hills, officials said.

Riordan accused Cauley last week of jeopardizing public safety by seeking to delay the award of the contracts.

“The mayor congratulates the Public Works Board on this important and decisive action,” Copen said. “We need those 911 facilities.”

The two LAPD dispatch centers are funded by Proposition M, a 1992 bond measure that provided $235 million to upgrade the police communications systems. The new 911 centers are viewed as critical because the existing system has crashed on occasion and is unable to accommodate the emergency-call load.

In addition, building one 911 center at Parker Center downtown and a second one in the Valley will allow the LAPD to have a backup if one system is knocked out by a natural disaster such as an earthquake.

While the projects have taken more than six years before contracts were awarded, both 911 facilities are still three years from becoming operational, according to Linda Bunker, the program manager for the 911 overhaul.

The downtown 911 center will take 18 months to build, while the Valley center will be completed in 21 months. Once the two centers are built, the city will need another 18 months to install the electronic hardware used by the 911 system.