School Site Report Unusual, Official Says : Education: Administrator says document critical of Santa Ana’s planned ‘space-saver’ campus holds district to a rigorous and unprecedented standard.

A state official who has overseen the purchase of hundreds of school sites said Monday that a sharply critical report by his agency’s real estate expert on Santa Ana’s planned “space-saver” school is highly unusual and holds the school district to a new standard.

“We’ve had other sites where the Office of Local Assistance real estate unit looked into it very closely, but not to this extent. This one seems to be more (thorough) than any other before it,” said Lyle A. Smoot, administrator for the seven-member State Allocation Board.

“It’s too bad that Santa Ana has to be the test case, because they’ve got enough problems as it is. This is just one more thing that gets in the way of having a school built.”

The innovative project, which would tap state funds to build a vertical school at the Bristol MarketPlace shopping center, has been plagued by criticism from some residents and several school board members, who say the school district didn’t adequately consider cheaper sites.

Critics also have blasted the school district’s plan to compensate the developer for the cost of relocating two businesses there.

The Office of Local Assistance report, received by school district officials Monday but detailed in press accounts over the weekend, says that three appraisals of the Bristol Street property ordered by the school district are inadequate because they don’t take into account soil contamination from gas tanks once buried at the site.

The report recommends denial of those appraisals, and that a fourth appraisal be obtained under the direction of Office of Local Assistance staff.

Smoot said the Allocation Board deals with contamination from buried gas tanks “all the time” and has never required that contamination be taken into account in the initial appraisals. Usually, Smoot said, the land is appraised and then it is determined how much a cleanup will cost and who will pay for it.

The report also states that cheaper sites are available to the school district, and that by using state money to compensate the developer for relocating the two demolished businesses, the Allocation Board’s actions could be misconstrued as “a gift of public funds.”

Smoot said the report, authored in part by Frank Harding, deputy local assistance officer for real estate, came as a surprise.

“It was only a few weeks ago that I found out that Frank Harding had such a problem with this site and was going to dedicate so much time to these issues,” Smoot said. “I don’t see the necessity for this.”

The Office of Local Assistance is the administrative arm of the Allocation Board. Harding could not be reached for comment Monday.

The report also states that Office of Local Assistance staff believes crews first analyzing contamination at the site bored too deeply and “carried the tank contamination down into the existing aquifer.”

The property owner, Scott Bell of Interstate Consolidated Industries, said the contamination was first discovered in 1989 and is limited to a contained area of about one acre. The contamination lies beneath the Montgomery Ward automotive center, which would be razed and relocated to make way for a staff parking lot for the school, he said.

Bell said that Montgomery Ward has agreed to pay to clean the contaminated soil, and that he had no knowledge of crews ever causing contamination to spread to an aquifer.

School officials Monday also lashed out at the report, saying they believed a meeting with the report’s authors two weeks ago had addressed the key concerns.

School board member Rob Balen said that for six months the Office of Local Assistance has been sitting on reports that detail soil contamination at the proposed school site, and should have raised the concerns earlier.

“To spring these issues on us at the last minute when the state has had these reports in their hands for months and months is totally unfair,” Balen said.

“It seems to me that they’re trying to find reasons to recommend against the project. Every reason they have come up with has been addressed. There is some kind of posturing going on with this, and we’re caught in the middle.”