San Francisco International Airpork

And then there is the mother of all change orders: the change order to write change orders. Tutor-Saliba billed $428,000 to pay for staff to write and process the blizzard of change orders Tutor-Saliba eventually submitted. Tutor says that he "does not get rich off of change orders," which, he contends, include only a 5 percent profit margin for his firm. But he declined to reveal the amount his company will profit from its SFO contracts.

One of the bigger wellsprings of SFO change orders is requests from the airlines that use the airport's terminals, led by United Airlines, which has one of its hubs at SFO. The airlines have a contract with the airport that limits the amount of construction costs that can be passed through to them. Through its position on the airport advisory committee, the Airline Liaison Office, which represents the airlines' interests, has considerable influence over the master plan. During the international terminal project, this combination of contractual limits and administrative influence has led to a situation in which millions of dollars of design and construction work was apparently done more than once.

Long after the construction contracts for the international terminal complex were let, the airlines, led by United, decided they wanted several exclusive lounges for use by first-class passengers. The Airport Commission approved these dramatic, costly changes, which include a $2.2 million lounge added to one boarding wing of the terminal. A similar lounge is in the works for the terminal's other boarding wing. All in all, there will be 14 lounges and clubhouses scattered about the new terminal.

Neither United Airlines nor SFO's Airline Liaison Office returned telephone calls seeking comment for this article. But, according to change order documents, inserting United Airlines' lounge required structural changes to the building's steel frames, including the addition of elevators and escalators, the removal of walls, and the relocation of electrical conduits, water and sewage pipes, ventilation ducts, and fire control systems. It took years to bend the buildings around the airlines' new clubhouses. Overall, the airport attributes $91 million in change orders to direct requests from the airlines and concessionaires.

There are other seemingly less than vital odd items larded into master plan change orders approved by the Airport Commission. When travelers are not eating fast food, or buying liquor in duty-free shops, SFO provides a scattering of mini-art museums for viewing pleasure. Over the years, these temporary exhibits have ranged in content from ancient boating artifacts to a retrospective of post-World War II children's lunch pail art. Now, however, the new international terminal will be home to a permanent, $4 million Aviation Archive, Library, and Museum, housed in a 6,000-square-foot replica of SFO's first terminal, built in 1937.

The archive will include rare books, purchased for $200,000 from a collector in New York City, that focus on airplanes. These books are not part of the spending on art that must, by law, be included in San Francisco's public works projects; they were added to the master plan in March 1999, even as the budget was closing in on being $1 billion overdrawn.

Every SFO change order was approved first by the construction managers overseeing the master plan, then by the advisory board, and finally by the Airport Commission. Any of the changes could have been stopped at any stage of the approval process. Instead of denying the airlines what they wanted, or holding architects and contractors responsible for what appear to be mistakes or substandard work, the commission generally decided to go deeper into debt to fund the cascades of change orders. And the change orders led to delays.

For instance, the two long concourses connected to the cavernous international terminal -- boarding areas A and G -- are more than a year behind schedule. And the concrete aprons surrounding them -- the airplane parking lots -- will not be fully ready for airplane traffic until after the terminal's recently revised opening date. One apron will not be ready until December 2000, two months beyond the opening. The other is on hold until December 2001, 14 months past the opening.

SFO Associates' Bruce Swanson says that most of the gates will be in operation by September, if all goes as planned.

But it seems that very little goes as planned at SFO. During construction, the costs of boarding area G rose from $64 million to $91 million, a 68 percent increase. Some of this additional cost was caused by adding extra concession space, which is needed to pay for such added items as the airlines' new first-class lounges.

VIP lounges aside, the airport has fined Tutor-Saliba $1.5 million for delays in building boarding area G. But this fine is the exception, not the rule. An airport spokesperson says this is the only penalty charged to date against a master plan contractor, architect, or engineer.

The San Francisco airport has hired 12 construction management partnerships, composed of 25 firms in various couplings, to oversee the airport master plan contracts. As agents of the airport, these firms are responsible for keeping the master plan on budget and on time. The leading construction manager is SFO Associates, a joint venture formed specifically for the SFO job. Its partners include Pasadena-based Parsons Infrastructure and Technology Group Inc.; AGS Inc., consulting engineers in San Francisco; EPC Consultants Inc., San Francisco-based office engineers with several city contracts; and Business Development Inc. of San Francisco, which specializes in hiring out its "odor control specialist" for city sewer contracts.