Lockheed unit wins parking tickets pact: but Councilman Holden still seeks to scrap the deal.

Lockheed unit wins parking tickets pact

But Councilman Holden still seeks to scrap the deal

The Los Angeles City Council, ending a heated competition that seemed more like a splashy television mini-series than a routine contract renewal, last week awarded Lockheed Information Management Service Co. a $49 million pact to process the city's parking tickets for the next five years.

Acting on the recommendations of two council committees, the council voted 10-1 to give the lucrative deal to IMS, a Teaneck, N.J.-based subsidiary of defense giant Lockheed Corp. IMS has been processing the city's 4 million annual tickets since 1985 under a contract that expired last October.

But Councilman Nate Holden, chairman of the Transportation Committee and the only council member to vote against IMS, said he would seek to overturn the contract and criticized other council members for going with Lockheed. Repeating a claim he has made for months, Holden said Lockheed is indirectly selling spare aircraft parts to a South African firm known as SAFAIR under a 1974 contract.

A 5-year-old city law generally prohibits the city from doing business with companies having ties to South Africa.

"There is a conspiracy going on and I am going to prove that Lockheed is doing business in South Africa," Holden said.

IMS Vice President Julie Sgarzi said that allegation was a "non-issue" and that Lockheed has been cleared of South African links by two separate city attorney reviews.

The contest to land the lucrative deal has had a life of its own since July. The City Administrative Office determined IMS' chief rival for the contract -- Andersen Consulting -- itself had ties to South Africa because of its membership in an international consortium. Despite claims of innocence, Andersen withdrew from the seven-firm consortium it was leading and a New Jersey company known as Computil Corp. took over last fall.

Three months later, the city's Department of Transportation endorsed the IMS bid, even though it was $6 million higher than competing ones by the former Andersen team and Detroit-based Tixon Corp.

Angered by that key recommendation, Computil and Tixon executives accused city officials, including Parking Administrator Bob Yates, of favoring Lockheed. They noted that Yates has received numerous meals and golf games from IMS and and that the company had made tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions to Mayor Tom Bradley and other council members during the 1980s.

A report by the City Administrative Office, however, agreed that IMS was the best qualified company, though some questions were raised about the objectivity of the city bureaucracy.

The competition took another turn in March, when two IMS employees were interviewed by the FBI in connection with a possible public corruption probe. Lockheed's attorneys were later told by federal authorities that the company was not the target of an investigation, Sgarzi said at the time.

City Councilman Michael Woo said "it was a mystery" why Holden was so opposed to IMS. "Holden is doing his best to smear Lockheed with a South African brush and I don't know why," Woo said. He noted the delay in awarding the contract has cost the cash-strapped city nearly $500,000 because of the difference in IMS' old contract and its new bid.

Holden, meanwhile, said the council file on the contract had disappeared along with the tape of the last transportation meeting.