Firm in Van Nuys Dispute Is in Line for LAX Project

Tutor-Saliba Corp., the construction firm that recently fought with Los Angeles airport officials over problems with a new parking structure, submitted the lowest bid Tuesday to rebuild the southernmost runway at Los Angeles International Airport.

The Sylmar firm’s $241.7-million bid was one of two received by the city’s airport department. The other, for $294.5 million, was submitted by Omaha-based Kiewit Corp., which previously has done construction work at LAX.

Both bids were substantially higher than the city engineer’s estimate of $217 million for the project.

The project involves moving a runway 55 feet closer to El Segundo, building a taxiway between the two parallel runways on the south side and shoring up the Sepulveda Boulevard tunnel under the runways so the massive 555-seat Airbus A380 can land on them.

Airport officials say the project is necessary to eliminate close calls between aircraft on the south side -- where 80% of such incidents occur. Redoing the southern runways at LAX is the first project in the city’s $11-billion modernization plan for the facility.

Last summer, the city’s airport agency took the rare legal step of threatening to remove Tutor-Saliba from a $34-million Van Nuys park-and-ride expansion project, saying the firm had failed to fix a series of construction defects in a five-story parking garage.

City building inspectors found that concrete columns in the parking structure were not properly aligned and that the concrete used in several columns, some of the flooring and a ramp was substandard, among other issues. City officials hired an outside engineer to determine whether the garage was structurally sound.

Tutor-Saliba subsequently demolished and removed several concrete columns, reinforced some concrete beams and replaced substandard concrete. As a result, the park-and-ride terminal and the ground floor of the garage opened about 3 1/2 months behind schedule and the rest of the garage seven months late.

Tutor-Saliba’s President Ronald N. Tutor said Tuesday that construction problems at the park-and-ride project, known as the Van Nuys FlyAway, were “minor,” adding that “all of the documents showed, and the airport accepted, the parking structure as having no structural issues.”

He said he didn’t believe there was any bad blood between his company and the city.

“If we quit bidding to people we argued with, we would run out of people to work for,” he said.

The firm is currently involved in litigation connected to its work on a new hospital at the UCLA campus in Westwood, the Red Line subway and San Francisco International Airport.

Airport officials said they wouldn’t comment on Tutor-Saliba’s work on the FlyAway or on the company’s bid for the south runway project until the bids come before the Airport Commission later this year.

Before the commission can review the bids, the city must finish an environmental study for the project. The comment period for this report ends Sept. 15.

Airport officials will review the bids over the next three months to ensure that they comply with city and federal requirements. The Airport Commission is scheduled to vote to award a contract Dec. 5 and construction is expected to start in January.

Because the city’s airport agency plans to use a federal grant to pay for a portion of the runway project, it is required under federal law to accept the lowest bidder. Los Angeles received a $38.8-million grant for the project from the Federal Aviation Administration earlier this month.

Federal officials have made it clear that they expect construction on the southern runways to start as soon as possible to reduce the chance of close calls between aircraft at LAX, which led the nation in such incidents between 2000 and 2003.

At LAX, planes land on the outer runways and must cross the inner runways to reach the terminals. Sometimes, pilots fail to stop far enough away from the inner runway on a series of taxiways between the runways. There have been six runway safety violations at the airport this year -- five of which were on the south side.