Contractors

The governing board of the Los Angeles Community College District voted Wednesday to sever ties, at least temporarily, with an Irvine contractor accused of submitting fraudulent claims on construction projects at two campuses and performing substandard work at one of them. FTR International will be barred from doing business with the district for five years after the Board of Trustees agreed with the findings of a hearing committee that the firm misrepresented work on its $48-million contract to build the Allied Health and Science Center at Los Angeles Valley College and the Health and PE Center at Los Angeles Mission College.

Government officials in L.A. have a long and mostly unsuccessful history of using public resources to try to engineer positive social outcomes - forcing contractors to pay a living wage, say, or seeking to improve living standards for port truckers under a regulatory program aimed at cleaning the air. We try to look at such efforts skeptically, because in benefiting some taxpayers they sometimes harm others, or give rise to unintended consequences....

For years, the Los Angeles Community College District has relied on Gateway Science & Engineering to supervise the $450-million rebuilding of Mission College in Sylmar. Gateway is paid to police construction quality, keep contractors on schedule and review all bills and payments. For at least a year, however, Gateway collected consulting fees from one of the main contractors it was overseeing on the campus, FTR International of Irvine. At the time, FTR was building a 90,000-square-foot fitness center at Mission, a project beset by delays, cost increases and alleged lapses in workmanship, district records show.

As a senior city housing inspector, Ronald Diaz's job is to be an impartial, frontline guardian of safe and habitable apartment living in Los Angeles. But according to testimony and statements given to city and state officials, Diaz also allegedly improperly moonlighted as an unlicensed contractor with some unorthodox billing practices: A North Hills woman accused him of offering a $1,000 discount if she would send him a text message with a picture of her bare breasts — and upping the offer to $2,000 when she ignored him. Diaz, 49, was charged Dec. 30 with five misdemeanor counts, including grand theft, attempted grand theft and contracting without a license.

Reporting from San Diego -- Corruption charges were announced Wednesday against two trustees of a suburban school district, a former trustee, a former superintendent and a building contractor in what San Diego County Dist. Atty. Bonnie Dumanis called a "pay for play" culture involving contracts for school construction projects. "The widespread corruption we uncovered during our investigation of this case is outrageous and shameful," Dumanis said in announcing 26 charges against the five defendants.

After a U.S. airstrike mistakenly killed at least 15 Afghans in 2010, the Army officer investigating the accident was surprised to discover that an American civilian had played a central role: analyzing video feeds from a Predator drone keeping watch from above. The contractor had overseen other analysts at Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida as the drone tracked suspected insurgents near a small unit of U.S. soldiers in rugged hills of central Afghanistan.

A Christmas morning house fire in an upscale Stamford neighborhood killed five people, three of them children, leaving neighbors and firefighters in tears. Firefighters rescued two people from the blaze: Madonna Badger, 47, the mother of the children, and a man whose identity was not available. Badger is a New York advertising executive. Police later said the man was a contractor renovating the home, and the two dead adults were Badger's parents, who were visiting for Christmas. Neighbor Charles Mangano said he saw rescuers walking Badger and the man away from the house toward an ambulance.

California may be the home of Silicon Valley, but for most of the last two weeks state officials have been unable to handle an elementary task of the digital age: putting information online about who is giving money and gifts to politicians. The database is older than Facebook, and it's the only easy way for the public to track special-interest influence in the Capitol and beyond. It lists donations and lobbying expenditures by unions, oil companies and billionaires, for example.

Kazuo Okawa's luckless career as a "nuclear gypsy" began one night at a poker game. The year was 1992, and jobs were scarce in this farming town in the shadow of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. An unemployed Okawa gambled and drank a lot. He was dealing cards when a stranger made him an offer: manage a crew of unskilled workers at the nearby plant. "Just gather a team of young guys and show up at the front gate; I'll tell you what to do," instructed the man, who Okawa later learned was a recruiter for a local job subcontracting firm.

Los Angeles County prosecutors are investigating possible criminal wrongdoing by two major contractors working for the Los Angeles Community College District as part of its $5.7-billion campus construction program. The inquiry centers on allegations by the district's inspector general that companies owned by Art Gastelum and Nizar Katbi submitted fraudulent billings for construction work at Mission College in Sylmar , Deputy Dist. Atty. Max Huntsman said Wednesday. The district alleges that Gastelum's firm approved a payment to Katbi's company for work it had not performed.