Campaign Backfires on L.A. Unified

It was the nature of campaigning to tell each audience what it wanted to hear, but in the case of Proposition BB it was also a tactic bound to backfire on the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The uproar over the proposed use of more than $40 million from the $2.4-billion in bond proceeds on a downtown high school can be traced to a campaign desperate to capture the necessary two-thirds majority, observers say.

Campaign organizers crafted a clever two-tiered scheme, boiling the diverse electorate into two halves: San Fernando Valley residents were told about air-conditioning and repairs for their schools, while inner-city parents were told not just about repairs, but about new school construction that would get their children off buses.

In truth, the bond language in the sample ballot pamphlet mentioned both sales pitches, and building the 3,600-student Belmont Learning Center with bond funds would not have siphoned money away from other promised repairs. In fact, the day after the bond passed, painting and security window projects began, as did preparations for bigger projects such as playground repaving.

But letting such a problem-plagued project as the Belmont Learning Center be the first major expenditure was certain to draw public outrage--particularly when the construction site at Temple Street and Beaudry Avenue is so distant in both miles and mind from the Valley voters who made up fully half of the electorate.

Mike Roos, president of the reform group LEARN and a former state assemblyman, said the district failed to follow elemental political logic. He recalled how former President George Bush had centered a television campaign around footage of Willie Horton, who committed rape after being released from jail on a weekend furlough.

“If that’s your total campaign, your first act has to be rescinding the furlough programs,” Roos said.

Likewise, for Proposition BB, he said, “the whole campaign . . . was basically going to schools and saying, ‘These were built when Teddy Roosevelt was president, this is not a dignified place for our children to learn.’ So the first act should be to initiate all the contracts that were on the walls of those schools and then at some point you can bring in Belmont as part of your construction package.”

Further blame goes to a school board so skittish about controversy in the weeks before the election that it put off voting on the Belmont Learning Center altogether--not so much because the project could dip into the bond till, but rather because the center’s appearance on the board agenda has never failed to prompt pointed questions about the district’s construction management abilities.

And so the outrage came in waves, enough to surprise the school board into reversing its decision to use bond money even before next Monday’s scheduled final vote. Officials changed their minds even though funding the school with general district revenues will cost several million dollars a year more in interest costs. They had to do it, board President Jeff Horton told his board colleagues in an internal memo, “to try to stop the frontal assault on us.”

So visceral is the outrage over using bond funds for Belmont that it has vaulted into the race to choose a new superintendent for the district, overshadowing many of the other issues that were expected to dominate that selection. (All three candidates have been grilled about their views by the media. Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias said he did not know the bond money would be used for the new school; banker William E. B. Siart said he needed more information, and Long Island school administrator Daniel Domenech said he would have stood by the decision, but taken more time to explain it to voters.)

The controversy has fueled the movement to create a separate Valley school district at a crucial moment, just as supporters had filed their first maps showing how they would sever themselves from L.A. Unified.

“I couldn’t have scripted it better myself,” said Scott Wilk, executive director of the Valley breakup group.

Even the teachers union, never one of the most vehement critics of the project, is now threatening legal action if the scheduled Monday vote on the school is not postponed long enough to allow the new bond oversight committee to take a long, hard look.

United Teachers-Los Angeles attorney Jesus Quinones said the union believes the district violated numerous laws in entering an exclusive negotiation with one developer nearly two years ago instead of going out to competitive bid. That--not the use of Proposition BB funds for the Belmont project--is what frosts the union, he said.

The UTLA suit, which may be filed this morning, is the first recent attack focused on the project itself. Longtime opponents of the Belmont Learning Center welcome it. Although they are enjoying the tide of public fury over the use of bond funds, they also worry that more significant objections to the school have been lost:

Should the Belmont Learning Center be built by the current developer, Kajima International, if the firm cannot secure promised retail and housing? Is the price tag of $87 million and rising--up from an original estimate of $60 million--too high? And, more broadly, what role should the bond’s oversight committee, created to increase voter confidence in the district’s ability to manage the money, play in each future expenditure of bond proceeds?

Steven Soboroff, Mayor Richard Riordan’s senior advisor and his appointee to the bond oversight panel, said he is appalled at the tenor of the criticism of bond funds for Belmont. He had unleashed his original opposition out of basic frustration when the school district initially balked at letting his group review the Belmont project before putting it to a school board vote.

“This thing has gotten out of control,” Soboroff said. The undertone of the outcry “is the Valley versus the city. . . . I don’t want it to slow up the repair of 900 schools. . . . All I wanted to do is look at it.

“Is there any deception going on?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”

Soboroff gets his first chance to look at the project this morning, at a hastily called meeting of Blue Ribbon Citizens’ Oversight Committee.

No one is more concerned about derailing the train of public thought than David Koff, who as senior analyst for the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union has been working behind the scenes to discredit the Belmont project for more than a year. Koff’s union is embroiled in a labor dispute with the Kajima-operated New Otani Hotel downtown.

The bond furor “certainly has gotten people away from talking about the substance of the project and the cost and all the rest of it,” Koff complained Thursday.

“It shouldn’t have happened, because even if the district had stated more openly in all of its publicity material that $900,000 of the $2.4 billion was going to construction, they still would have had a problem with the Belmont project.”