Board Orders Review of Alameda Project’s Hiring of Blacks

Faced with complaints that not enough African Americans are being hired to help build the $2.4-billion Alameda Corridor, government officials in charge of the project vowed Thursday to resolve the employment dispute by the time major construction begins early next year.

The board of the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority ordered a review of the agency’s hiring practices and job training program to determine whether African Americans are underrepresented in the work force.

In addition to a staff report, board members said they would invite representatives from labor unions and the corridor’s main contractors to discuss the matter at the December board meeting.

The decision came after six members of the public addressed the board and complained that blacks were not getting their fair share of jobs generated by building the 20-mile rail link to the county’s fast-growing ports.

Among the speakers were two African Americans in the first graduating class of the corridor’s job training program, which plans to train 1,000 people over the next several years.

“They promised us jobs at the corridor during our training,” said Bronson Johns, 52, of San Pedro, who completed the three-month

course in April. “No one in our class has gotten a job with the project. The training was all about nothing.”

Another April graduate, John Watkins, 49, of Los Angeles, told the board that he received four certificates from the corridor’s job training program for carpentry, lead and asbestos abatement, and hazardous waste removal.

“But,” Watkins said, “I have not been called for the Alameda Corridor project.”

Although some job training graduates will go to work for the corridor, authority officials said no guarantees were ever given to anyone. They said they are concerned that false hopes may have been created by the corridor’s job training process, which was not intended to be a main source of employees for the project.

“There is one thing worse than no hope and that is false hope,” said Los Angeles City Councilman and Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority board member Rudy Svorinich Jr. “If we are producing false hope, then we have a serious issue related to the project’s credibility.”

Whether enough African Americans were getting hired for corridor jobs first surfaced as an issue several weeks ago, when contractors and community activists began looking into the racial makeup of the project’s work force.

Two activists, Nareshimah Osei and Preston Young of Community Watch in Los Angeles, have been conducting regular head counts at corridor construction sites along Alameda Street.

Although they are rough surveys, they indicate that fewer than 5% of the workers are African American, a figure in line with the corridor’s estimates of 4.3%. Blacks make up about 21% of the population in the six cities the corridor passes through.

Osei said Thursday that he was satisfied with the board’s offer to review the project’s hiring practices. “They have been put on the spot,” he said, “so they will have to do something.”

James C. Hankla, the authority’s chief executive officer, said that for several weeks he has been talking with union officials and construction companies about the hiring of African Americans. He said that whatever problems existed should be eliminated by the time the project moves into its main construction phase in January.

“The issue has been troubling for us,” Hankla told the board.