Cost-Cutting Fuels the Drive of a Caltrans Value Engineer

Bob Bazargan is a freeway cruncher.

An engineer at Caltrans, he specializes in something called “value engineering,” a little-known field that has risen to prominence in the dollar-tight environment of the 1990s. Every time Caltrans comes up with a plan to improve Orange County’s highways, Bazargan assembles a crackerjack team of engineers who spend three to seven days going over the proposal. Their goal: to come up with creative ways of enhancing efficiency to save dollars.

Over the last four years, Caltrans officials say, Bazargan and his crew have saved Caltrans about $40 million. And today, the agency is thanking him with its E. Darwin Spatz Excellence in Value Engineering Award, named after the father of Caltrans value engineering who retired in 1992.

“It’s been of monumental importance,” Flo Levario, a Caltrans spokesman, said of Bazargan’s work. “All of these savings add up and, in the long run, multiply. This is especially important nowadays with the shrinking dollar. He is very talented.”

Bazargan, 38, an engineer for 13 years, says he never planned on a career in value engineering. He said he hadn’t heard about it until five years ago, when he saw a Caltrans job posting.

“Nobody else wanted the job,” Bazargan said. “Everybody wanted design work, but I think this is more creative.”

Over the years, Bazargan’s financial and engineering creativity has taken some interesting turns.

Looking at a plan to rebuild three overpasses of the Costa Mesa Freeway in Santa Ana and Tustin, for instance, the value engineering team did some creative rescheduling. Instead of building the bridges one at a time, they worked on two, cutting the time contractors would be required to be on the job by almost a third. And they saved Caltrans a cool $1 million.

Another time, Bazargan suggested changes in the design of a bridge over the Riverside Freeway to avoid affecting a restaurant parking lot that Caltrans otherwise would have had to buy. The savings: about $500,000.

And once he persuaded the agency to build an underground concrete culvert for a channel in the path of a freeway widening project rather than constructing sound walls and barriers to keep the water contained. As a result, Bazargan says, Caltrans saved about $100,000 on construction and much more in ongoing maintenance.

“Sometimes it’s amazing,” he says of his job. “It seems like sleight of hand.”

*

Speaking of which, another Orange County resident finds magic in places where the rest of us see only steel and wood.

Kenge S. Ling, an engineer who lives in Orange, is obsessed with bridges, particularly their construction. Ling recently spent two years of his life on his favorite hobby, photographing bridges at various stages of their development. The result is a self-published book called “Photographs of I-5 Bridge Construction in Orange County, CA.”

Don’t let the title stop you. It’s a 138-page compendium containing 300 photographs sure to stir the bridge-lover’s heart, ranging from views of wooden and steel-girder skeletons to the almost-finished product looking sleek and concrete.

Most of the photographs, Ling said, were taken during the Santa Ana Freeway reconstruction project between Grand Avenue and 17th Street.

“The bridges are thin now, not the big monsters that they used to be,” said Ling, 50, who first started photographing bridges after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Part of his goal, Ling said, was to document the damage caused by that earthquake to the north and its antidote--proper bridge construction.

“Sometimes tourists are scared of California earthquakes,” he said. “This book will show them that our bridges are built to modern standards.”

Beginning with a press run of 300 copies at a cost of $2,000, Ling gave scores away to Orange County schools, universities, libraries and Caltrans. He sold about 50 copies to friends, relatives and some construction companies. But about 100 are sitting in cardboard boxes at his house, he said, still waiting for the eyes and hearts of the curious or the charmed.

“This will give them ideas,” he said of would-be readers. “They can learn step-by-step construction. They can learn how an urban bridge was built from beginning to end.”

If that sounds interesting, you can order a copy for $25 from Irvine Sci-Tech Books at (714) 733-1002.

Street Smart appears Mondays in The Times Orange County Edition. Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about traffic, commuting and what makes it difficult to get around in Orange County. Include simple sketches if helpful. Letters may be published in upcoming columns. Please write to David Haldane, c/o Street Smart, The Times Orange County, P.O. Box 2008, Costa Mesa, CA 92626, send faxes to (714) 966-7711 or e-mail him David.H[email protected] Include your full name, address and day and evening phone numbers. Letters may be edited, and no anonymous letters will be accepted.