New School Built on Tainted Fill

Alarmed by reports of environmental “hot spots” on the site of a new high school just south of downtown, neighborhood activists demanded a meeting in the summer of 2003 with officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

They recalled promises by L.A. Unified officials that the school district would not repeat the mistakes of Belmont, a $180-million high school complex temporarily abandoned in the late 1990s because it had been built without protection over pockets of potentially explosive methane gas.

“We were assured that, especially after Belmont, the school would be clean,” said Cecilia Nunez, a founder of the grass-roots group Neighbors for an Improved Community. “We didn’t need to be concerned.... We accepted that as God’s truth.”

What school officials failed to say at the time, however, was that their handpicked developer had violated the district’s environmental specifications by using hundreds of cubic yards of fill from a stockpile contaminated with carcinogenic PCBs and high levels of harmful petroleum byproducts, according to public and confidential records obtained by The Times.

In fact, the records show, school officials failed to tell state environmental regulators that the fill was already in the ground when the regulators ordered the school district not to use it. L.A. Unified officials kept mum for two years, despite a state law requiring school districts to notify regulators whenever contaminants are detected at a school construction site, records and interviews show.

School district officials are now scrambling to test the potential toxicity of the fill used under the administration building at the 19-acre site, a month before the campus is supposed to open as the city’s first new comprehensive high school in three decades.

Community leaders, stung by the revelation that the school district withheld information about the tainted debris, say that no matter what the tests show, they want the district to remove the contaminated material, which also lies under the gymnasium.

“We were promised a clean school,” Nunez said in an interview last week. “It can’t be ‘kind of contaminated’ ... or ‘partially contaminated.’ It has to be clean.”

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry said L.A. Unified’s handling of the debris problem has become a matter of institutional trust as school officials embark on a $14.4-billion initiative to build 160 schools and renovate hundreds more.

“It’s actually very cruel to do that to a community. You lift people up, raise their expectations, only to find out there is some awful subterfuge going on. That’s cruel,” said Perry, whose district includes the campus, South Central L.A. New High School No. 1.

She promised to take further action against L.A. Unified, if necessary, to ensure removal of the contaminated debris from the site, known as Santee High.

Roger Carrick, an environmental lawyer who directed a highly critical Belmont probe as outside counsel for L.A. Unified’s inspector general, said the district apparently did not learn Belmont’s basic lesson: “When in doubt, err on the side of the strict interpretation of environmental regulations.”

The contaminated fill was a byproduct of demolition at the school site, on Maple Avenue between Washington Boulevard and 23rd Street. It was once home to the Santee Dairy plant, as well as lead battery recycling, train maintenance and metallurgy operations over the years.

Tens of thousands of cubic yards of crushed concrete, asphalt, bricks and tile left over from demolished buildings were piled at the site. The school’s developer, W.P. Carey & Co., had hoped the crushed fill could be used for grading the site, but most of it was hauled away and disposed elsewhere.

However, hundreds of cubic yards were used under the administration building and the gymnasium, as well as on the surface for a temporary construction road and temporary storm berms around the site’s perimeter.

The harmful petroleum residues contaminating the fill, known as total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPHs), are byproducts of the crushed asphalt. The source of the PCBs, a banned substance previously used in electrical transformers, is harder to determine.

Although there were transformers on the site at one time, school officials say, the PCBs may also be byproducts of the crushed asphalt.

Contamination levels at the site won’t be known until results are back from testing expected to go through the weekend, said state and district officials.

Documents show that earlier tests performed by the developer found PCB levels of up to 2.4 parts per million in a pile of construction debris.

The PCB level was below the state’s threshold of 50 parts per million for a declaration of “hazardous waste,” but eight times above what the state considers acceptable in residential areas -- and high enough to prohibit its use on a school site under state and school district rules.

L.A. Unified’s environmental testing standards prohibit the use of fill dirt with any detectable levels of PCBs.

The tests also detected elevated levels of lead and total petroleum hydrocarbons up to 4,000 parts per million, or 40 times what the school district says is allowable at school sites.

“We can’t say everything’s fine, go about your business,” said Peter Garcia, who ordered the new tests as chief of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control’s office in Cypress.

Because the contaminated fill is now buried on the school site, Garcia and school district officials say, it poses no immediate health threat to the 2,000 students scheduled to begin classes July 5.

But Garcia said his office won’t be able to fully analyze the contaminated debris’ long-term impact until its toxicity is better understood. The major concern, he said, is that workmen, students and nearby residents could become exposed to the debris during future excavations.

Angelo Bellomo, director of the district’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety, said in a recent interview that using the contaminated fill without notifying the state toxic control agency was an “illegal act.”

He said Carey had primary responsibility under a unique “turn-key” contract to follow environmental rules and notify the Department of Toxic Substances Control.

The deal, designed as a way around the cumbersome competitive bidding requirements for public projects, called for Carey to build the school on a fast-track schedule for a fixed price of $107 million. While the contract imposed strict environmental standards on Carey, it also offered the firm a $2-million bonus if it completed the school by September 2004 -- an ambitious deadline it did not meet.

Bellomo acknowledged that the district also had a reporting obligation once it discovered contaminated fill had been used on the site. “We should have told them the minute we found out about it,” he said.

In an interview Thursday, L.A. Unified Supt. Roy Romer said he remains committed to opening the school on time. He promised to test every area on the new campus where the contaminated fill has been used. But he insisted that any comparisons to the environmental hazards faced at Belmont are overblown.

“I want to get it tested, because I do not want to have even the suspicion that anything on the site is a problem,” Romer said.

Asked whether he would go along with demands to remove the material, Romer said: “It’s just wrong to take it out if it’s not a problem.... I’ve got to know what the tests show and then I’ve got to get the very best expertise, and if we don’t have the gosh-darned thing cured, we’ll cure it.”

A spokesman for Carey referred questions to the firm’s Los Angeles attorney, Thomas Harnsberger, who said he learned about the use of the crushed debris last year but was not concerned.

“So the world’s not perfect, and somebody put it there,” Harnsberger said. “That’s unfortunate, and it’s not a risk to anyone. So why is that significant?”

The question of what to do with demolition debris was always a significant issue during construction at the former dairy plant.

Even before closing escrow on the property in mid-2002, L.A. Unified warned Carey that use of the crushed material during construction violated district specifications.

“In no instance is the use of concrete rubble or other building debris acceptable at the site,” wrote Tom Watson, L.A. Unified’s environmental consultant on the project, to Carey’s on-site contractor in May 2002. The same message was relayed a few days later to Harnsberger and Carey vice president Brent Carrier, who was in charge of the project.

But school officials discovered in April 2003 that the developer’s team had put 550 cubic yards of the prohibited fill into a 35-foot-deep hole, which was capped with 15 feet of clean soil, records show. The fill is now under a corner of the administration building and the adjacent sidewalk.

The discovery came a month after the state toxic control agency halted construction at the site when it learned that the developer disturbed environmental “hot spots” of suspected contaminants, unrelated to use of the contaminated fill, without telling regulators.

Rather than disclose the buried debris to the state agency at that time, records show, the district fretted privately.

In an April 25 memo, Watson proposed giving the developer a choice: Either remove the debris and replace it with clean fill, or “indemnify and hold harmless the District from any potential liability....”

Neither happened.

Two months later -- after the “hot spot” issue was resolved and construction resumed -- Watson pursued a third option. He began lobbying the state toxic control agency to let Carey use the contaminated rubble as backfill at the behest of school district facilities officials, without telling the state that it already had.

The school facilities officials, he said, hoped state approval would “trump” the district’s own rules prohibiting its use.

Watson’s appeal mentioned the presence of PCBs, which he urged the state to consider acceptable. State regulators immediately seized on the presence of PCBs to deny Watson’s request.

“DTSC determines that the material is not acceptable for use as a subsurface fill,” Shahir Haddad, the state environmental contact for the school project, replied July 3, 2003. “Even though the stockpiled fill material is proposed for use at 10 feet [below ground surface], this would constitute disposal of contaminated material.”

A week after that determination, a school district environmental official attended the meeting with the community activists. The official, Mary Elaine Valenzuela, never mentioned the issue of the contaminated fill being debated internally by the district and the developer.

“I didn’t think it would be something we would share with the community, if we didn’t share it with DTSC yet,” said Valenzuela, Watson’s colleague who had been copied on e-mail exchanges regarding the fill.

The state agency remained unaware of its use for the next year, even after the rest of the huge debris stockpile was carted away.

But in July 2004, Watson raised a red flag once again in a confidential e-mail to Jay Golida, an L.A. Unified environmental attorney. Watson noted that a testing firm hired by Carey had made no mention of using the contaminated fill in one of its final environmental reports to state regulators.

“In fact, the report incorrectly states that the materials were not used on the site,” Watson wrote. “It is recommended that the developer be reminded again of this issue and that they raise it with the DTSC.... “

Based on the erroneous report from Carey’s testing firm, the state toxic control agency issued a letter in August 2004 clearing the way for the final phase of construction at Santee. It also asked for a wrap-up environmental report.

It was in this report, dated September 2004, that the first and only disclosure about the debris was made to the regulators -- in a paragraph in one of the back sections.

It made no specific mention of PCBs or the use of fill under the gymnasium. It concluded that the fill “does not represent a potential threat to the future of the site.”

Harnsberger, Carey’s attorney, said the one-paragraph disclosure, made after the buildings had been constructed over the material, was “perfectly adequate.” He also said the disclosure evolved from discussions between the developer’s team and school district officials.

Garcia, the state environmental official, said his agency wasn’t expecting anything new in the report and didn’t catch the one-paragraph mention.

The agency was unaware of the issue until officials were approached by a Times reporter last month. It immediately ordered L.A. Unified to begin testing and is now researching whether it can take recourse against the district for withholding information about the fill, Garcia said.

Had the agency known about it, he said, it would not have given the site its final environmental clearance in October.

“No, we wouldn’t have signed off,” he said. “We would have required further work, just as we are requiring now.”