Skanska and Stacy Witbeck start six years of work on LA Metro's Valley light rail

The Skanska and Stacy Witbeck joint venture has started major construction on LA Metro's East San Fernando Valley Light Rail Transit Project, holding a groundbreaking at Van Nuys Civic Center with Metro, local officials and residents. Skanska's release describes it as a $2.43 billion contract, and completion is targeted for early 2032.

What's being built

The line runs 6.7 miles at street level along Van Nuys Boulevard, with 11 new stations and a 26-acre rail and maintenance facility. The scope also takes in utility relocations and improvements along the corridor, which on a street-running alignment through a dense, established area is usually where much of the early risk sits. Metro expects trains every seven to 10 minutes at peak times once the line opens.

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Construction Dive reported on 27 October that the $2.43 billion figure is the total project cost including preconstruction, and that the JV's contract with LA Metro is worth $1.9 billion. Skanska put its share of that contract at $957 million, roughly half, and first announced the win in August.

"A groundbreaking marks the start of construction, but this project represents something much bigger for the community" Clayton Gilliland, President, Stacy Witbeck

James Bailey, executive vice president of Skanska USA Civil's West Coast operations, framed the ceremony as the start of six years of work for the team.

A partnership with form

This is not a new pairing. Skanska and Alameda-based Stacy Witbeck have worked together as a joint venture on five infrastructure and rail projects in Southern California, including the Sixth Street Viaduct replacement in downtown Los Angeles. Stacy Witbeck is a specialist in rail and transit civil work, and pairing it with a large general contractor is a familiar model for big transit packages in the region.

The JV is also running the San Fernando Transit Constructors Careers Academy, which offers professional development courses to people living in or near the project footprint who want to get into construction.

The bigger picture

Southern California transit work is busy. A few days earlier, on 23 October, LA Metro broke ground on a 12-mile bus rapid transit corridor, and the Valley line adds a multi-year anchor job to an already full regional pipeline. A six-year build also means the JV will be hiring and backfilling field leadership well into the next decade, alongside other large programmes competing for the same rail and utility specialists.

What it means for hiring

Street-running light rail is utility relocation, traffic staging and systems integration as much as track. In our view, the scarce hires on jobs like this are utility coordinators, MOT specialists and rail systems managers, not just civil superintendents.
Joint ventures of this size tend to build a dedicated project organisation. That creates openings for project directors, construction managers and commercial leads who are happy to commit to one job for several years.
With several Southern California transit jobs running at once, we'd expect contractors to compete harder for people with LA Metro experience, and retention to matter as much as recruitment.

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