Second in a series
Re “How City Hall’s Fundamental Gaffe in Choosing Alliance Backfired”
For skating fans of the Culver City Ice Arena, frustrated by the dearth of information flowing from the rink or City Hall, here is the latest:
It was predicted at last Friday’s city-sponsored inspection of the interior conditions of the arena that the findings would be reported by Monday.
When City Hall’s outside attorney, Bill Litvak, was asked whether the examiner, Mike Dillon of Long Beach, had filed his results, his retort was guarded.
“I cannot… I don’t know where or who he would file them with,” Mr. Litvak said.
“With you or at City Hall, would he not?”
“I am not prepared to comment on the status of his report,” Mr. Litvak said, which was where the interview was laid to rest.
The Wright Path
[img]2484|right|James Wright||no_popup[/img]Then it was on to Jim Wright, P.E., principal of Wright Engineering Associates of Fullerton, hired by the Arena last month to conduct an independent assessment of conditions, including the ammonia that City Hall stamped a public health hazard, a result that Mr. Wright deftly reversed.
Mr. Wright related an extraordinary story about the genesis of last month’s damning Alliance Industrial Services report to City Hall that effectively mothballed the arena as a going business for the foreseeable future.
City Hall and Mr. Litvak triumphantly pinned all of their hopes for bringing down the walls of the Ice Arena on Alliance’s report. By Mr. Wright’s telling, there may be more hokum than authentic evidence in the conviction report whose author to this hour remains an unsolved mystery.
Complaint Dept.
(Earlier, attorney Nadine Lewis, on behalf of Arena owner Michael Karagozian, filed dual complaints with the state Board of Professional Enmessy gineers, Land Surveyors and Geologists, out of the state Dept. of Consumer Affairs, against Walnut-based Alliance and owner Grant Golding.)
An engineer named David Smith originally was believed to have authored the widely discredited Alliance report, but new findings hold otherwise.
Mr. Wright is not surprised that Alliance has landed in the center aisle of a messy situation. “I am disappointed that they took the job in doing what they did,” he said. “I think they were naïve. They really should have deferred to an independent kind of expert, like a Mike Dillon, who inspected the arena last Friday. He is not a contractor, unlike Alliance. He is not a competitor. In that way, he is more like me. “
Mr. Wright said that Alliance, recommended to City Hall by Los Angeles County hazard materials experts, “was out of its best element. The way it turned out, they probably were led in pretty innocently – ‘We want you to look at the refrigeration system, blah, blah.’ Then they get together with the fire chief, who has all of these other things he wants them to take notice of to be included in the report.”
A high-stakes race was on to meet a panting City Hall deadline.
The Alliance report not only was completed the same day of a City Council meeting where members were eager to learn the results – but the writing was hurriedly, nervously finished mere minutes ahead of the rush-rush delivery to Council Chambers.
That may account for some of its most egregious blunders.
(To be continued)
