By Savannah Blackwell

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors' Finance Committee has delivered an anti-Valentine's Day message to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission's general manager: break up with Bechtel Infrastructure Corp.

This is the latest salvo in the city's struggle to figure out the best way to handle the overwhelming project of rebuilding the more-than-150-mile Hetch Hetchy water system that serves two million customers in San Francisco, the peninsula, and Alameda County.

San Francisco, which owns and runs the system, needs to make sure those customers don't go without water if a major earthquake hits.

SFPUC chief Pat Martel told Sups. Chris Daly, Sophie Maxwell, and Aaron Peskin at the committee's Feb. 13 meeting that preserving the city's partnership with Bechtel would best help the agency do the job.

In making the pitch for Bechtel, Martel defied the board's decision last November to phase the global corporation off the payroll. She had help in her effort: representatives from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Bay Area Water Users Association, which represents 29 agencies that get their water from San Francisco's system, backed her up at the meeting.

As the committee was discussing the issue with Martel, state senator Jackie Speier arrived at City Hall for the second time in the past month to pressure other supervisors into supporting a November ballot measure authorizing more than $4 billion in bonds to pay for the repairs. Speier has a heavy hammer: a move in the state legislature by other Bay Area leaders for a regional takeover of the system if San Francisco can't handle the job.

But the Finance Committee is standing firm with the union representing the SFPUC's engineers, who say that Bechtel's real aim is to privatize the system and that the company's help hasn't been worth the millions the city has paid for it (see "Bechtel's $45 Million Screw Job," 9/12/01). The supervisors were angry that Martel made yet another pitch to keep the company on board.

"I get upset because we make an agreement, and then these forces fight us," Daly said at the meeting. "We can do this [project], but we can't do it with Bechtel."

Daly went so far as to say he and other progressives would oppose a bond measure to fix the system if the city was still working with Bechtel, which is known for privatizing public systems in other parts of the world.

Since the supes first told Martel to dump Bechtel last November, she has made some improvements to the contract. The corporation is no longer trying to bill for travel and personal expenses, SFPUC sources said. But representatives from the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 21, and several high-level engineers said that Bechtel's performance hasn't improved enough since reports and reviews criticizing the deal came out last summer and fall to warrant keeping the corporation's $45 million contract, despite Martel's claims.

The SFPUC has a very real problem. After years of bad management, the agency doesn't have enough engineers and workers to handle the more than 200 projects on its to-do list. The union and the supervisors have a solution: hire a slew of engineers fast and put those available from projects already completed in other city departments on the job.

Some supervisors and SFPUC insiders say the agency should begin the reconstruction project immediately by starting work on at least one key project. About $300 million is available from the sale of the agency's Bernal property in Pleasanton and from the passage of two bond measures in 1997. The Irvington Tunnel, which runs between the Calaveras and Hayward Faults, would be a good place to start, they say. If that pipeline, which was built in the 1920s and hasn't been inspected for at least 30 years, goes out of service, about one million Silicon Valley residents would be without water.

Daly, Maxwell, and Peskin acknowledge that the SFPUC needs some sort of outside help to get going. But Daly, for one, said any consultant should be limited to helping the agency set up a star team of city engineers and project managers. Then that group, under the control of chief engineer Karen Kubick, should grow its ranks and settle in to constructing the scores of projects.