Firm Rebuked Over Work on Park and Ride

Citing shoddy construction materials and workmanship and repeated citations by building inspectors, Los Angeles city officials Friday threatened legal action against giant Tutor-Saliba Corp. over its work on a park-and-ride facility in the San Fernando Valley.

The city’s airport department has given Tutor-Saliba two weeks to meet a series of conditions to get work back on track on a parking garage and terminal building at the Van Nuys FlyAway. The $34-million project, scheduled for completion this summer, is weeks behind schedule.

“We are holding Tutor’s feet to the fire,” said Kim Day, interim executive director of Los Angeles World Airports. If those conditions are not met, she said, the city will formally put Tutor-Saliba on notice that it has to correct deficiencies within a specific time frame or face further legal action.

Since the company began work to expand the facility last April, it has failed on numerous occasions to fix problems cited by city building inspectors, according to documents obtained by The Times. Several of these issues compromised the structural integrity of the parking structure, reports filed by the project manager said.

The Sylmar firm was also cited by city building inspectors for using substandard concrete on the site, a problem that in part led inspectors to shut down work there in November, records show.

Ronald N. Tutor, the corporation’s president, called the situation a “tempest in a teapot” and said his company is working to resolve the issues. It has also replaced the firm that is supplying concrete to a subcontractor on the project, he said.

“We think these are all issues that happen in the normal course of a project, that are being resolved,” Tutor said. “They are not trivial, but they are not out of the ordinary.”

Last year, the Van Nuys FlyAway served 732,921 people who parked there and boarded buses for Los Angeles International Airport. The 29-year-old facility’s popularity with commuters prompted the city to begin the expansion. Airport officials hope to use it as a prototype for future FlyAway lots in other communities.

The expansion was the first of three major public works projects Tutor-Saliba was awarded in Los Angeles last year after a 2001 lawsuit filed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. In that case, a Superior Court jury decided that Tutor-Saliba should pay the MTA $29.5 million for submitting false claims while building portions of the Metro Rail Red Line subway. Tutor-Saliba is appealing the award.

The company is also facing legal problems in San Francisco, where the city attorney is seeking millions of dollars from the firm for allegedly overbilling the city and manipulating minority contracting laws as lead contractor on the expansion of San Francisco International Airport.

In Los Angeles, Tutor-Saliba withdrew from competition in 2000 for a $250-million sewer construction project after the Department of Public Works and the city attorney’s office, then headed by now-Mayor James K. Hahn, raised questions about its fitness, citing the firm’s legal problems with the MTA.

But Tutor-Saliba’s problems obtaining work in the city ended with the award of the Van Nuys FlyAway contract in January 2003. The award came after airport officials concluded that the firm’s track record on other public works projects had been strong and that its past legal problem with the MTA should not disqualify its low bid on the project.

By then, Tutor, his employees and their spouses had donated $39,000 to Hahn’s 2001 mayoral campaign. Tutor also spent more than $75,000 to fund a last-minute mailer in the race, and he contributed $100,000 in 2002 to a Hahn-led effort to defeat San Fernando Valley secession, records show.

Hahn’s administration is now the focus of a grand jury investigation by Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who confirmed Wednesday that he was trying to determine whether mayoral aides and city commissioners had gone beyond “heavy-handed political fundraising” and improperly required contractors to make political contributions in return for city business.

Cooley commented publicly on the inquiry one day after the City Council voted to prohibit city commissioners from raising campaign funds for local elected officials. Hahn, who has denied any involvement in improper fundraising, immediately signed the new law and urged the council to go even further by prohibiting contributions and fundraising by contractors and land-use applicants.

During the contract selection process for the FlyAway expansion 18 months ago, airport officials initially expressed reservations about Tutor-Saliba’s track record. But the company was the low bidder for the project, forcing officials to take a closer look at the firm.

The Airport Commission ultimately voted to hire the company after airport staff received positive references about the firm’s construction work from UCLA, the Beverly Hills Unified School District and the Port of Los Angeles. The city attorney’s office also determined that the ruling in the MTA case should not bar Tutor-Saliba from working with the city, because the case was on appeal.

Even so, airport staff appointed a special panel and a construction manager to monitor the firm’s work in Van Nuys. The manager filed extensive monthly reports -- with color photos -- documenting Tutor-Saliba’s progress. These reports show that problems occurred almost immediately after work began last spring, according to a review of the documents conducted by The Times.

Since April, inspectors have issued 169 citations to Tutor-Saliba for everything from “rock pockets” in beams on the parking structure, to improper disposal of storm water, to improper welding procedures in the terminal, records show.

Inspectors typically issue 10 such orders on a project of this size, said the airport agency’s Day.

In November, building and safety inspectors ordered work on the site shut down after they found that concrete columns on the parking structures were not aligned properly, reports written by the construction manager show.

At that time, inspectors also found that concrete used in several columns in the parking structure, as well as on parts of the flooring and a ramp structure, was substandard, records show.

Tutor-Saliba used a jackhammer to demolish concrete on two columns, according to the records. During this demolition, workers damaged the steel rebar on the columns, leading to a citation from building inspectors ordering them to replace this material, records show.

Tutor called this an isolated problem.

“These are things that happen from time to time,” he said. “Out of 100 columns that were purportedly misaligned, there are two at issue here. Human beings still build these jobs, not machines, and mistakes get made.”

Fixing and testing the steel rebar is one of the conditions that Tutor-Saliba and airport officials have agreed to fulfill over the next few weeks, Day said.

The company has also promised to install equipment on the site to clean water before it flows into the city’s storm drain system and has agreed to allow more inspectors on the site, she said.

“With our own inspectors and engineers in the field, we are not concerned that we will end up with a building that is not structurally sound,” Day said. “Our concern is ... we [will] have to keep stopping work and” adjusting the schedule.