The Glendora to Montclair extension of the Gold Line light rail project in Southern California is close to hiring an alignment design-build contractor, as the official Request for Proposals was released to four pre-qualified, short-listed teams. The Construction Authority, the organization in charge of building the Gold Line, made the announcement on May 31.

The RFP includes ninety-thousand pages of updated engineering and project information, including detailed drawings of every aspect of the 12.3-mile project, said Gold Line CEO Habib F. Balian in news statement.  

The four short-listed teams vying for the more than $700 million contract are (in alphabetical order): AECOM | Stacy and Witbeck JV; Herzog Rados Lane, a Joint Venture; Kiewit-Parsons, a Joint Venture; and San Gabriel Valley Transit Partners (STP), a Joint Venture of Fluor and Ames.

The teams have until September 12, 2018 to submit proposals, after which, each will be reviewed by several committees of experts and ranked. A winning bidder will be selected later this year.

The design-build contract to build the roughly $1.5 billion, 12.3-mile Glendora to Montclair Alignment Design-Build Project is worth about $750 million. The Glendora to Montclair section is an extension of the Metro Gold Line light rail system that currently runs between East Los Angeles and Azusa.

As the project awaits the alignment design-build contractor, Long Beach, CA-based W.A. Rasic Construction is continuing its work to relocate and protect utilities that cross the railroad right of way from Glendora to Montclair. To date, Rasic crews have completed nearly half of the total work tasks, with the remaining utilities to be completed this year, said Balian

Last month, the California Transportation Commission approved a nearly $300 million grant request from the State’s Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program to complete the Foothill Gold Line from Glendora to Montclair. The project was one of several submitted by LA Metro to be awarded grants; totaling nearly $1.8 billion in awards county-wide from SB1 and the Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program (TIRCP).

The Foothill Gold Line was identified as Metro’s top priority for the TIRCP program; resulting in a full grant award to fill the estimated funding gap included in the Construction Authority’s financial plan. The Construction Authority will know the final cost for the project later this year, when bids are received and this award was “critical to keeping the project on schedule,” said Balian.