Board Ignores Signals in No-Trump Bid

The State Allocation Board this Wednesday will once again consider the request by the Los Angeles Board of Education for more than $73 million to become, in effect, developers of the Ambassador Hotel site.

The board has doggedly, some would say pigheadedly, pursued the 23.5-acre site in the Mid-Wilshire District for a new senior high school since the landmark hotel was closed two years ago.

The pursuit took on an added dimension earlier this year when the Donald Trump organization bought an interest in the site and announced plans for an ambitious commercial development there, topped by the world’s tallest skyscraper. (Happily, the scheme has since shrunk considerably.)

Although Trump has selected the local firm of Johnson Fain & Pereira, known for its sensitive urban design work, planning efforts to come up with an acceptable mix and scale of uses for the site have been placed on the back burner as the school board plays its hand.

The involvement of the controversial Donald Trump, and the excitement it caused among those championing a real estate renaissance in the area, apparently has strengthened the resolve of the board to acquire the site through condemnation and, as they say in development circles, become a player.

Responding to concerns that the well-located and valuable site could be better used to generate income to offset the acquisition cost, the board has proposed that the high school be combined with a 30-story office tower, a retail mall and three department stores.

According to the scheme yet to be made public, the commercial development would be focused on Wilshire Boulevard, most of the educational facilities on 7th Street, and the athletic fields and gymnasium on 8th Street, bordering the residential district to the south.

A public library, police station, 120 units of housing perched on one of the department stores and parking in a variety of structures for nearly 5,000 cars also is included in the scheme drafted by the firm of Leidenfrost/Horowitz & Associates.

Although the board has declined to discuss the plans, at least with me, it has been hawking the concept to various developers. Most are said to have viewed the mix with apprehension, the planning and design with reserve, and the board’s entrepreneurial posture with embarrassment.

“Unmarketable,” was the conclusion of one prominent developer. “Unfeasible,” said another.

Even if the proposal was in theory marketable and feasible, there is a real question whether the board could make it happen.

To do so, numerous local and state laws on school construction, allocation of real estate taxes and public leasehold arrangements would have to be amended, as would zoning ordinances and building and safety codes.

The process, no doubt, will take years. As for the children the board says it wants to serve, they will once again be shortchanged, while the lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats have a field day.

In New York City, where such combined public school, and housing and commercial projects have been built, it took on the average six years for each to move from concept to completion.

And that happened only after four years of studies and lobbying on the local and state levels to create a special, nonprofit public benefit corporation to carry out the task independent of the city’s school bureaucracy.

The Los Angeles School Board last February passed a well-worded and well-intentioned resolution to explore, among other things, the planning, financing and legal implications of a more imaginative facilities program, including possible multiuse developments.

But words do not make a program. Repeated efforts by me through the board and through a concerned mayoral aide for education to track what was happening and discuss possible demonstrations were to no avail. Meetings were scheduled and canceled, then scheduled again, only to have the district’s representative fail to appear.

I was disappointed but not surprised, especially having witnessed the board’s insensitive attempts at land grabs over the last several years. When it comes to planning and design, the board gets a major “F.”

It is therefore hard to take seriously the board’s proposal for the complex multiuse development of the Ambassador site. You just know it is going to be a boondoggle.

If the board in the past had not displayed so little imagination in its construction program, be it for even the simplest addition, let alone a major high school, perhaps the proposal could be labeled presumptuous.

If the board, after announcing its intentions for the site nearly two years ago, had not heard from a bevy of local interests, or had not reviewed various planning reports for the area, the proposal could be dismissed as simply insensitive to community concerns.

If the board’s draft environmental impact report for a high school on the site had not received from the city’s Planning Department a year and a half ago such a pointed response--the report was politely deemed inadequate--the proposal might be excused as poorly conceived.

But put in the broader perspective of the failure of the city’s public education system, as judged by test scores, class sizes, dropout rates, campus crime and teacher and administrator ratios and salary discrepancies, the request to allocate such an excessive sum for such a dubious project has to be labeled irresponsible.

Adding all this up it becomes depressingly evident that the proposal for the Ambassador site is a perversion of the board’s condemnation powers and its school planning and construction program.

And it raises the question of whether a program so vital to public education, and therefore the future of the city, should be entrusted elsewhere.

There is little argument that we need new public schools to replace inadequate and unsafe facilities, and to handle the present overcrowding and the anticipated increase in students.

But this need will not be met by the board by going to the mat over the Ambassador site. Rather, it should be met by the development of more flexible and shared facilities, not unlike what has been done by some very successful private schools here and experimental public schools in other cities.

The board should also explore the possibility of adapting commercial and industrial spaces for classrooms and theaters for auditoriums, making better use of present school properties, shifting administration into inexpensive office buildings, and generally becoming more imaginative and flexible.

As for Trump’s project, an opinion on whether it will meet the architectural, economic, and social needs of the Wilshire District and the city must await the unveiling of the anticipated plans. One just hopes that Trump will benefit from the mistakes of the school board.