District Settles Suits Against Leasing Schools

Eliminating one of the obstacles blocking a critically needed program to raise money for school construction, the San Diego Unified School District has tentatively settled lawsuits with community groups over its plans to lease two closed schools to developers.

School system lawyer Christina Dyer on Thursday announced the settlements with groups contesting the planned 99-year leases of Dana Junior High School in Point Loma and Farnum Elementary School in Pacific Beach for construction of multifamily housing.

But the district cannot proceed with the leases, designed to raise badly needed revenue for school construction in overcrowded parts of the city, until a task force of City Council and Board of Education members agrees on how the school sites should be used.

The five-member task force, which is scheduled to complete its work and hold a public hearing on its plan next month, is trying to decide how to divide five sites for use as park land and residential developments. Included are Dana, Farnum, and three other closed elementary schools: Cleveland in San Carlos, Scripps in La Jolla and Grantville in Allied Gardens.

Also pending is a council decision on whether to change the zoning regulations at the three closed school sites.

The school board is scheduled to ratify the Dana and Farnum settlements at its meeting Tuesday. If the board approves, the agreements should be signed later in the week, she said.

The Community Coalition for Dana filed suit in May, 1985, claiming that residents of the community around the school were not given the chance to comment on the 99-year lease plan and that an environmental impact assessment of the planned residential development was not conducted. The Beach Coalition for Farnum followed with a similar lawsuit last December.

Under the agreements, the school board will delay the lease of the properties while it holds public hearings through an advisory committee and conducts the environmental assessments.

Barring prohibitions from the council-school board task force, the trustees would then be free to lease the properties to their chosen high bidders if the hearings and environmental assessments showed development is feasible, Dyer said.

The school district will also pay $15,000 in attorney’s fees to the Dana coalition and $6,770 in attorney’s fees to the Farnum coalition. The district would pay additional fees if it ultimately moves ahead with the lease plans, but could sue to recover the fees if it does not.

“I think we followed the law,” Dyer said. “But I think rather than string this out in the courts, we should get on with the business of managing our property. I think both sides gain through this settlement.”

Jerry Cluff, attorney for the Dana coalition, called the agreement “an outstanding victory” for residents of that community. Lawyers and leaders of the Farnum group, which negotiated a separate agreement with the school board, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

“I think it’s a good deal for the public because they have the rights to be heard and they forced those rights upon that public body that did not want to hear them,” Cluff said.

“What this agreement says is that when (the school trustees) are going to make a decision that takes public property out of the public trust, they have to consider the public input. It’s not a Point Loma issue. It’s a wider issue. I think this litigation has affected the manner in which they make their decisions,” he said.

Under the district’s “property management program” the Dana lease would yield $392,000 a year for 99 years and the Farnum lease would produced $337,000 a year for the same time period. Both figures would be adjusted each year to account for inflation.

That money, and the proceeds from the lease of the four other closed schools, would be used to pay the interest on school construction loans used by the district.

School district officials have said that the plan is their only available method to raise tens of millions of dollars needed to build new schools as enrollment soars from the current 113,000 to an expected 160,000 by the year 2000.