EYEWITNESS: THOMAS S. SAYLES : Road-Building, Trailblazing : Century Freeway: It’s opening at long last, with a proud record of working with, not against, the community in job-training and hiring.

When I was about 10, my grandmother lived in a house on Fourth Avenue in Los Angeles. Her home was taken by what is now the Santa Monica Freeway. I never will forget how she felt being displaced and not informed about what was going on.

What we have learned over the last 20 years it took to build the Century Freeway is, early on in the process, to address those concerns and to get the support of the community on the project.

This project has been a part of my life in the community that I grew up in for as long as I can remember. I’m from South-Central Los Angeles and my parents live on Van Ness and Florence, about a mile from where the riots broke out.

My first memories of the Century Freeway were hearing people talk about how it was going to divide a community. I also have a real clear memory of the litigation, because I was a lawyer at the U.S. Attorney’s office. This is probably the costliest piece of litigation, certainly in the Central District, if not in the state.

Initially, there was an injunction by Judge Harry Pregerson that said, in essence, you will not impose this freeway on the people of this community. And he created the ad hoc citizen’s committee after John Phillips and his Western Center on Law and Poverty brought a suit on behalf of some of the people who lived in that community. This was at a time when public-interest litigation was a fairly new concept.

What came out of this was by far the best job-training program that I’m familiar with. It is called the Century Freeway Pre-apprenticeship Program. I’m real sensitive to the argument that says we can’t find qualified minorities to do certain kinds of jobs. Well, sometimes that involves training folks. The Century Freeway program is a good example of how, when you train people, you get the results you want. About 3,000 people from the community completed the Century Freeway project training program and 2,600 people actually were placed in full-time construction jobs.

One of the guys who is very much involved in this program as a trainer was a classmate of mine at Washington High School, which is probably a mile from the freeway, at Century and Western.

We think that in total, the Century Freeway program created about 18,000 jobs--that’s direct jobs--and then maybe as many as 27,000 more indirect jobs because of the ambitious programs for working with all minorities, including female-run businesses and the disabled.

Relocation of displaced people, which the Century Freeway program accomplished, is a big part of making sure that the community participates. The housing program created over 5,000 units in that community.

The Century Freeway experience taught Caltrans how to work with a community in building a freeway. The best example was after the (Loma Prieta) earthquake in San Francisco destroyed the I-80, which goes right through the city of Oakland. We are in the process of rebuilding that freeway now, and in large measure because of the Century Freeway experience, we started working with the community immediately after it was destroyed.

So the location of the freeway was done in concert with the community. We had commitments which are very ambitious in terms of minority-hiring goals and using minority vendors. We got citizen input on an ongoing basis. And all of that, I think, is the product of what we learned in the Century Freeway.

The message is, in the past I think people who built freeways thought that they could just dictate to a community the terms of that freeway. And we learned from the Century Freeway that you couldn’t do it nor does it make sense to do it that way.

I’m looking at this as a business person. The Century Freeway cost a lot more than it should have. It is cost-effective to avoid unnecessary litigation. And I think when you don’t work with the community, you are inviting litigation. We simply cannot afford the additional expense of having to fight with the community.

I don’t want to blame anyone. My point is that we’re smarter now. And that you don’t have a choice but to work with communities when you try to build public infrastructure.

No one wants to be excluded from things that affect their lives, whether you live in South-Central Los Angeles or Beverly Hills.