Alameda Rail Project Lags on Hiring Goals

Despite a long-standing promise to train and hire low-income people, officials of the $2.4-billion Alameda Corridor project revealed Thursday that they are falling far short of their goals to recruit workers from the cities along the route of the new rail link.

The shortfalls prompted members of the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority board to criticize the effectiveness of the project’s hiring efforts and its $10-million program to provide job training to 1,000 underprivileged people over the next two years.

One of the authority’s goals is for 30% of all work hours on the project to be performed by employees recruited from the nine cities along the corridor’s route. Some of those cities contain the county’s poorest neighborhoods. The project was 81 workers short of the mark at the end of last year.

To fulfill another goal, 60 to 70 graduates of the agency’s job training program should have been hired by the corridor’s contractors as of December 1999, but only 11 were employed at that time.

“Something must be wrong if only 11 graduates are working for the project,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said at the authority’s board meeting Thursday. “There needs to be some real analysis done” of this effort.

The Alameda Corridor is a 20-mile-long toll route for trains that is designed to improve the movement of cargo to and from the county’s fast-growing ports. It is scheduled to be finished by the end of 2002.

Work on the new route is expected to create between 8,700 and 9,200 local jobs over the life of the project, or about 1,300 positions a year. As of December, about 600 people were on the job.

The corridor’s recruitment goals and educational opportunities have been of critical importance to residents and elected officials in such cities as Compton, South Gate and Lynwood, which have had unemployment rates as high as 30%.

Hiring and job training is overseen by the corridor authority, but it is administered and implemented by a team of construction firms headed by Tutor-Saliba Corp. of Sylmar.

“We are behind at this point,” said Larry Wiggs, community relations manager of the Tutor-Saliba consortium. “But 90% of the work remains to be done and we have another two years to attain our goals.”

Wiggs and corridor officials attributed the shortfalls to recruiting problems, high dropout rates and the placement of many program graduates in construction jobs unrelated to the corridor.

Although Los Angeles’ port has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for the corridor, statistics show that the hiring of Los Angeles residents fell short of the corridor’s goal by 12%.

“This is unacceptable,” said authority board member and Los Angeles City Councilman Rudy Svorinich. “Why is my city lagging behind when Los Angeles is a major stakeholder in the corridor? We should be reaping the benefits of this project.”