The Foothill Gold Line Construction Authority has its builder for the last leg of the A Line. On a unanimous vote this month, the authority’s board handed the construction manager contract for the 2.3-mile Pomona-to-Claremont extension to a joint venture of Skanska, Stacy Witbeck and Herzog, clearing the way for design to firm up before heavy work begins.
The award looks modest on paper. The initial construction-manager deal runs about $6.3 million and covers an 18-month preconstruction phase, not the dig itself. What it really does is lock in the team that will most likely build the line.
What the A Line extension covers
The project carries Metro’s A Line 2.3 miles east from Pomona to a new station in Claremont, the next increment of the decades-long Foothill Gold Line buildout through the San Gabriel Valley. During preconstruction, the Skanska-Stacy Witbeck-Herzog team will run constructability reviews, value engineering, cost estimating, and coordination with the freight railroads and utilities that share the corridor.
Once design reaches roughly 85%, the JV gets the exclusive shot at negotiating a guaranteed price to build it. That’s the construction-manager/general-contractor model doing its job: bring the contractor in early, price the risk together, and head off the bid-day surprises that have wrecked transit budgets up and down California.
Why the construction manager award matters now
Major construction isn’t slated to start until late 2027, with about four years of building after that. So why name a contractor this early? Because the costliest mistakes on rail jobs happen before anyone pours concrete. Utility conflicts, grade-crossing fights, and quantity errors baked into a design are far cheaper to catch on paper than in the field.
Skanska knows the routine. The same contractor sits on the Halmar-Skanska team picked to lead the $8 billion Penn Station rebuild and recently won a $1.06 billion MBTA bridge job in Boston. Pulling that experience into the A Line’s design phase is the whole point of the early award.
The extension still needs its full funding package confirmed before 2027. But after years of stop-and-start planning east of Pomona, Claremont finally has a contractor on the clock. (Railway Track and Structures)