LAX faces FAA audit, city probe of contracting processes

LAX faces FAA audit, city probe of contracting processes Federal examiners will launch an audit in July to examine the financial practices of Los Angeles International Airport executives, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday.
   FAA auditors will review five years of financial records for Los Angeles World Airports, the semi-autonomous city department that operates LAX and three other city airports.
   FAA, which declined to speculate on what it may find, described the audit as a routine review of the LAWA books to ensure the department is abiding by the strict terms of its federal grant obligations. The FAA said the audit will be conducted July 29 to Aug. 8.
   LAWA officials, advised last month of the pending audit in an FAA letter, said they would cooperate fully with the federal examiners.
   The FAA typically conducts similar audits of two to three major U.S. airports each year to assure grant compliance.
   The public announcement of the routine federal audit comes one week after the Los Angeles City Controller began an unrelated probe into the awarding of a $25 million project management contract to Los Angeles-based DMJM to handle $5 billion in LAX modernization projects. In a first round of scoring on bids for the contract by a committee of airport executives, San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. earned the highest number of points, 259 out of a possible 290, according to scoring sheets obtained by the Torrance Daily Breeze. DMJM came in second with 233 points.
   The city controller wants to know why Gina Marie Lindsey, the airport's executive director, ordered a second round of scoring, and why the second round by the airport executive committee dramatically reversed the previous round's scores, with DMJM scoring 280 points and Bechtel scoring 237 points. Lindsey did not sit on the bid scoring committee, but did approve the committee's request for a second round of scoring.
   The city controller's office, which expects to have a formal report completed on the bidding incident by next month, has issued two previous audits finding that LAX lacks consistent guidelines in awarding contracts and calling for airport officials to rectify the problem.
   Lindsey, who has repeatedly denied any impropriety in the DMJM award, joined LAX last year.