The ABCs of Holding Up a New School

The fate of a badly needed new high school for the city’s poorest and densest neighborhood hinges on the outcome of an intense union campaign against the developer of the proposed 35-acre Belmont Learning Center in the Temple-Beaudry area, just west of downtown Los Angeles.

But this story involves more than the usual provincial agendas and “NIMBYism” that have held up countless other local construction projects. Rather, the two institutions most often viewed as crucial to boosting poor and working-class Latinos up the economic ladder have squared off in the dispute.

On one side is an 8,000-member, 75%-Latino union, the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Union Local 11, and its politically savvy leader. On the other is the Los Angeles Unified School District, which first applied for state funds to build the new high school in 1985. Several Latino elected officials have weighed in on the side of the union, in part because organized labor is the single most effective political interest group within Latino-dominant districts. Organized labor, which, ironically, represents only 15.4% of L.A. County’s Latino workers, compared with 22.6% of non-Latinos, considers Latino elected officials among their most reliable supporters.

Caught in the middle are the area’s 37,000 mostly Latino students who already must contend with considerable socioeconomic burdens outside of school. The existing Belmont High School, which currently serves 5,000 students, is California’s second-largest high school and has been overcrowded since the early 1980s. Among other things, a new high school would allow the 660 students from Belmont High and Virgil Middle School districts who are currently bused to the San Fernando Valley to stay close to home. The old high school, according to plans, would become a middle school.

The Los Angeles Board of Education’s final vote on the project has been delayed until at least next month amid charges ranging from mismanagement and corruption to political blackmail and racketeering.

At the heart of the dispute is Local 11’s opposition to the school board’s selection of Temple-Beaudry Partners, a team headed by Kajima International, Inc., as the project’s developer. Kajima owns a controlling interest in the New Otani Hotel and Garden in Little Tokyo, the target of a four-year campaign by Local 11 to organize the hotel’s 250 workers.

Local 11, as well as United Teachers Los Angeles, had urged the board not to select Kajima to build the school. The unions cited Kajima’s war crimes during World War II and more recent allegations of improprieties, including a potential conflict of interest involving the high-school project. While acknowledging Kajima’s history and conceding some of the charges, the board voted, in September 1995, to enter into exclusive negotiations with Kajima. In August 1996, the board voted 6-0, with one abstention, to enter into the last phase of negotiations with Kajima and spend $4 million to continue planning the project.

Since the initial selection of the developer in 1995, Local 11 has adopted other arguments to drive home its opposition to Kajima. Because the school district cannot terminate its negotiations with Kajima as a tactic to force the developer to address its labor practices at the New Otani without engaging in an illegal secondary boycott, Local 11 has sought to prove the project’s financial inviability. In addition to a new school, plans call for retail businesses, housing and recreation facilities on the site.

In another offensive, Local 11 has waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to stir up opposition to the Belmont project in the media. Much of the “bad press” appeared a week before the school board was scheduled to take a final vote on Feb. 24. In late January, the union held a news conference, at which Local 11 representatives hinted of “possible corruption” connected with the development, and state Sen. Richard C. Polanco, a longtime critic of both the project and the site, called for an independent investigation of the whole matter. He cited changes in the development’s plans and mistakes in the district’s developer-selection process that could have tipped the scales toward Kajima.

Polanco, in whose senatorial district the school would be located, wants the new high school built on the site of the now shuttered Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, which is owned by a firm headed by New York real-estate developer Donald Trump. Besides enjoying close ties to Local 11 and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, Polanco has received both political and campaign support from Trump-Wilshire Associates. The district’s failed negotiations with Trump over a purchase price ended in still-unresolved litigation.

Before the Feb. 24 vote, Polanco and Assemblyman Antonio R. Villaraigosa sent identical letters to Sen. Leroy Greene, chair of the Senate Education Committee, calling for a hearing to investigate the charges swirling around the Belmont complex. State Sen. Hilda Solis of El Monte also sent a letter.

Councilman Mike Hernandez, in whose district the new school would be located, has gone from enthusiastic supporter to skeptic. In mid-February, he sent a letter to school board members informing them that he had lost confidence in Temple-Beaudry Partners because of errors made in the selection of the developer and the “developer’s inconsistencies with the financial terms.” He has also been pressed by Local 11 and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to oppose the involvement of the only supermarket to agree to go into the neighborhood because it is nonunion. Ironically, Local 11’s researcher, David Koff, counts the developer’s inability to find a supermarket tenant for the project as one of its failures.

Meanwhile, parents in the Belmont cluster are frustrated with a process that has already taken too long. Some are even being lobbied. The president of the parent-advisory council at Belmont High received an unsigned overnight package containing an article condemning the project. Concerned parents at elementary schools nearby, most of whom are Mexican and Central American immigrants and whose children would attend the new high school, are aware of only bits and pieces of the high-powered political drama affecting their lives. More than 200 parents showed up at the Feb. 24 board meeting to protest any more delays.

In justifying her union’s campaign, Maria Elena Durazo, Local 11’s president, says the school project is a more attractive target than Kajima’s other local contracts, which involve the subway and the Alameda Corridor, because of what she says is the school district’s relative lack of “vigilance” over their projects. She also professes the right to defend the concerns, both as workers and as parents, of the 1,000 Local 11 members she claims live in the Belmont area. She believes that a Local 11 victory in the struggle over the New Otani, which has become a symbol of the new labor movement, would inspire workers both in Los Angeles and beyond.

Durazo has been able to count on labor and political support from both within and outside Los Angeles. As the scheduled Feb. 24 vote neared, some members of the school board reportedly received calls from officials of the AFL-CIO and their political sympathizers. Day Higuchi, president of UTLA, the teachers’ union, sent a letter to board member Victoria M. Castro, who represents the Belmont area and has championed the new learning complex, imploring her to “reject this project” out of a belief “in principles of justice and fairness.”

But it should be the school board, not state legislators or labor officials, that decides whether Local 11’s list of grievances with the project should hold it up any longer. It’s hard to imagine how politically motivated investigative hearings will put this Belmont project back on track. They can only ensure greater costs in time and money in a development already well behind schedule.

Rebuilding a failing education system is crucial to California’s future well-being, particularly for its Latino population. One would think that all the parties involved in the struggle over Belmont High would consider schools too important to be used as political pawns. Even after Belmont is built, LAUSD will still need 18 more schools to provide adequate space for L.A.’s schoolchildren.