Fluor-led consortium has butted heads with Los Angeles International Airport for years, county grand jury said
The World Cup soccer matches held in Los Angeles could have been a showcase for the Los Angeles International Airport's new automated people mover, which promised to trim airport traffic jams and make access easier. Years late and over budget, the project instead is a painful example of megaproject mega-problems.
As thousands of visitors arrive, "the long-awaited SkyLink Automated People Mover remains unfinished and has yet to carry its first passengers," stated a website post from UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs. The system, rebranded as SkyLink, was to have completed testing June 30.
Delays have been a key reason that the cost overrun is $880 million.
That figure was the central focus of a public investigation completed last year by an L.A. County grand jury that evaluates contentious issues.
Michael S. Shapiro, a consulting engineer who is an expert and author on megaprojects, says the automated people mover is "an example of how major projects can run into a second layer of risk beyond engineering—involving governance complexity, contract structure, accountability diffusion and delayed public benefit."
The 2.25-mile elevated guideway, part of a huge renovation of the entire airport, has three stations in the airport and three outside. There was an original completion date in 2023 and budget of $1.03 billion construction cost and another $918 million financed by a private concessionaire.
LINXS, the design-build-finance-operate-maintain consortium hired to build and run the system, consists of Fluor Corp., Balfour Beatty, Dragados USA, Flatiron, Hochtief PPP Solutions, HDR and HNTB. Alstom is the train manufacturer and operator. Work started in 2019.
A year ago, Fitch, which rates bonds issued for the project by the California Municipal Finance Authority, noted that although the consortium and the airport have demonstrated an ability to successfully negotiate time extension and cost relief claims, "the history of contentious disputes creates higher risks for timely project completion."
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Project tensions may not have completely finished. In a progress report submitted in May, LINXS noted that the airport still had some "blockers" to the beginning of passenger service related to the airport approving some design documents and finishing landscaping.
The biggest current delay on the critical path, according to the consortium report, is airport delay in making a pact with the Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power for "customer utility accounts" and solar power interconnection agreements for the project.
The status of those issues is unclear and whether they are a reflection of the project's controversial past also is not known.
Design work got off to a rough start in 2019. The LINXS design was done to the local and state bridge construction code, but later the project team learned that it had to meet the buildings seismic code. Blame for that mistake was the first major conflict.
A second arena of conflict opened over delays in responding to requests for information. According to the 2025 county grand jury assessment of what happened, the consortium bombed the airport with over 200 RFIs, and while it awaited replies and answers to change order requests, work slowed considerably.
Construction work on an early phase of the SkyLink automated people mover at Los Angeles International Airport. Photo: Courtesy of Los Angeles World Airports
The grand jury did not consider the project to be mismanaged, nor the outcome a result of fraud or abuse. It suggested mildly that some of the consultants involved could have done a better job.
Instead, it frames the project as a public accountability and governance case, centered on the $880-million cost increase, says Shapiro.
The grand jury suggested that the consortium, aware of the time pressure the airport faced in assuring the system was operating in time for the 2028 Olympic Games, continued working in compliance with its contract but at a slower pace. Contracts with LINXS, in retrospect, the grand jury claimed, should have been better written to assure that continuing with work while awaiting contested issues did not allow for only "one worker with a shovel."
Aware of its "leverage" via time pressure within the contract terms, the grand jury suggested the consortium's experience with such matters gave it an advantage.
Fitch also noted a slowdown in the work but is not clear exactly who was to blame and the details of activity at the jobsites.
Fluor, the lead construction party in LINXS, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the end, the grand jury wrote, the airport agreed to $252 million in change orders priior to the code compliance issue, another $97 million to pay for redesigns that were code compliant, and $550 million more for amounts covered by what was called a "global settlement" that encompassed airport-caused delays in the work. That was the basis, more or less, for the $880-million increase.
Deadlines and Excessive Change Orders
In replying to its report, the City of Los Angeles partly agreed with the grand jury to implement various recommendations. It agreed to consider in future projects whether deadlines related to events could lead to excessive change orders, to coordinate all code issues related to a project and that a schedule of "submissions" should be implemented to prevent city departments from being overwhelmed, a practice the city said was already the policy.
The city also agreed it needed to exercise more due diligence in selecting a contractor, including how it would interact with city departments. Clearer contract language also is needed. the city agreed, on how progress on a project is maintained while disputes are resolved. For larger projects, more than one person needed to serve as the "project neutral."
In general, the city and grand jury agreed, disputes need to be wrapped up more quickly. Consider bonding with claw-back provisions that would be applied to the losing side in litigation to prevent slow-downs during litigation, the grand jury recommended. It also advised possible use of "baseball arbitration," where both sides submit final monetary offers and the arbitrator picks one.
"Will be implemented," was the city's response.
There's one more soccer match still to be played at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, between Spain and Belgium on July 10. It's too late for the people mover, but the SkyLink system will be carrying thousands of people each week when the Olympics start in mid July 2028.
By then the lessons learned from it will hopefully be well absorbed by everyone, including the contracting companies that hope to work on future Los Angeles megaprojects.