This Tutor hasn’t learned his lesson

Steve Lopez’s column in the Los Angeles Times recently wrote a piece about mega-civil engineering contractor Tutor-Saliba.

Tutor-Saliba is one of the most prominent construction firms in the world, and it is responsible (or irresponsible) in building our Metro Rail system, as well as other Southern Projects including Coliseum restoration, LAX, water treatment, UCLA’s Santa Monica and Westwood hospitals, and the San Diego Convention Center.

For a firm with the ability to win so many nine-plus-digit contracts, Tutor-Saliba almost always gets into trouble with its clients.

Lopez writes:

The building’s being constructed by Tutor-Saliba, a contractor with a long history of high-profile disputes with public agencies. Los Angeles-based Tutor-Saliba and several partners agreed last year to pay $19 million to settle a suit alleging over-billing on a project at San Francisco International Airport.

Tutor-Saliba has also been involved in contract disputes with Los Angeles airport officials, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Los Angeles Unified School District and UCLA. So it was no surprise that just before Christmas, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed a committee to keep an eye on the LAPD project.

What spurred Lopez’s piece was … surprise … a cost overrun, this time involving the Los Angeles Police Department’s new downtown headquarters. A project that was originally to cost $177 million may end up being as much as $420 million.

Even more interesting was Ronald Tutor’s quotes to Lopez.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” he snarled, telling me he wasn’t going to waste his time trying to educate a [expletive] newspaper columnist.

The reason nobody else bid on the job is that construction companies have gone out of business in droves, Tutor argued, saying that doing work for public agencies in California was “a traumatic process at best.”

[...]

“The truth of it is, I don’t trust anybody who works for the L.A. Times,” Tutor said as I tried to keep him on the phone, because there was no telling what might come out of his mouth in such an agitated state.

This is one reason why good public relations people keep their charges on short leashes.

But Tutor should know to keep a better demeanor. His firm can beat out other construction outfits, even with such a dodgy reputation. And, when Tutor agitates the press, he can expect an equal and opposite reaction in the form of more reporters eyeing the firm and its documents.

The subway construction was its most controversial project, and Tutor-Saliba’s stewardship played a big part in getting Zev’s Law passed in 1998. The Red Line had Tutor-Saliba teaming up with another controversial firm, Perini. It’s largest shareholder is Richard C. Blum, husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein, and it holds a major contract for Iraq war reconstruction.