Contractors

The popular, though independent Spanish-language ministry at the Crystal Cathedral, where people stand in line for hours to get a seat, may not move with the church's English-language services when the time comes. According to the terms of a $57.5-million deal approved Thursday night in Bankruptcy Court, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange will purchase the property and require Crystal Cathedral ministries to move to a new location within three years. The diocese plans to use the cathedral as its own after that; St. Callistus Catholic Church, also in Garden Grove, has been presented as an alternative site for the English-language ministries.

House Republicans and Democrats joined to pass the first pieces of President Obama's jobs package, sending to the president a slim slice of common ground while the bulk of the legislation remains stalled in a divided Congress. The legislation passed Wednesday will repeal a tax on government contractors, boost job training for veterans and offer tax credits to companies that hire unemployed veterans. The House passed the measure without dissent, and Obama has said he would sign it. The Senate overwhelmingly approved it last week.

Work crews have finished scooping tons of chemical-laden sediment from the historic Rhine Channel in Newport Harbor, completing a $4-million project ahead of time. The channel, once a bustling home to fishing fleets and cannery operations, has long been contaminated by mercury, pesticides and other toxic chemicals. The city's contractor, Dutra Dredging, beat the year-end deadline to dredge the channel and haul the contaminated sediment to Long Beach, where it will be used as fill dirt for a construction project.

The Los Angeles Community College District is moving to fire a third major contractor it has accused of mismanagement in its $5.7-billion construction program as part of a crackdown spurred by a Times series on waste and abuse in the campus rebuilding program. In a letter released Tuesday, the district accused Turner Construction Company, which supervised West Los Angeles College's construction program, of failing to inform the district that approval of projects at the campus would cause a $123-million budget shortfall.

The House of Representatives voted Thursday to repeal a tax on government contractors, easily advancing a small slice of President Obama's jobs bill in a move hailed as rare bipartisan cooperation. The bill repealing a not-yet-imposed 3% withholding tax passed overwhelmingly on a  405-16 vote. Obama proposed a further delay of the tax in his jobs bill, while Republicans pushed to repeal it all together. Just a handful of Democrats opposed the measure and the White House has said it supports the bill.

The House of Representatives voted Thursday to repeal a tax on government contractors, achieving a rare moment of bipartisan agreement to pass a bill proponents argue will create jobs. The bill to repeal a not-yet-imposed 3% withholding tax passed 405 to 16. The measure was among the least controversial elements of President Obama's jobs bill, although Obama called for delay of the tax while Republicans backed a full repeal. After very little wrangling, just a few Democrats opposed the measure, and the White House said it supported the bill.

Patrick Lynch, while serving as general manager of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a stadium contractor who deposited the money in a Miami bank, according to interviews and documents. The contractor, Tony Estrada, told Coliseum attorneys that the money came from an increase in his billing rate for janitorial services approved by Lynch, according to sources who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Estrada said he paid Lynch about $1 per hour per janitor for roughly 4 1/2 years, according to the sources.

The Los Angeles Community College District is moving to fire an Irvine contractor accused of shoddy workmanship and fraud in the construction of a Valley College classroom complex that became a symbol of problems with the district's $5.7-billion campus rebuilding program. In a letter released Tuesday, the district launched proceedings to bar the contractor, FTR International, from campus work for up to five years. The district cited "substandard work" by FTR on its $48-million contract to build the Allied Health and Science complex at Valley College . The district also said FTR filed a "false and fraudulent" report on the project with the state architect, which oversees school safety.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday threw out a key provision of a program aimed at reducing diesel emissions from trucks hauling containers from the Port of Los Angeles. The three-judge panel based in San Francisco eliminated a so-called employee provision from the port's effort to replace older, heavily polluting drayage trucks with lower-emission models. The rule would have effectively ended trucking companies' use of independent contractors to haul containers and forced the companies to shoulder responsibility for replacing, properly operating and maintaining trucks.