School Bond Efforts Earn Mixed Grade for 1st Year

On the first anniversary of the largest school bond in the nation’s history, a volunteer oversight committee Wednesday praised Los Angeles school officials for getting off to a fast start, but also criticized bureaucratic failures that hampered the work.

In a “good news-bad news” assessment, the Proposition BB committee created by voters to watch over $2.4 billion in repairs and improvements offered no final grade, merely saying, “We are now looking for ways to do substantially better.”

The first-year report reduced the BB record to 10 positives and 10 negatives, with the negatives holding the clear edge in impact.

They included the lack of a master plan to ensure that the most important work will be done before the money runs out, behind-the-scenes manipulations by district staff, insufficient control over contracting, and poor foresight in planning asphalt replacement that will leave schools devoid of landscaping.

On the positive side, the committee lauded the district for having hundreds of projects ready as soon as the bond measure passed and patted itself on the back for introducing ideas such as campus greening and taking corrective measures to be sure every school gets equal treatment.

It also praised Supt. Ruben Zacarias and Mayor Richard Riordan for their encouragement and support.

The report said 1,647 projects have been launched, and, of those, 1,044 were done. That represents about 14% of the five-year repair schedule started and 9% completed.

In a more glowing report in December, committee Chairman Steven Soboroff had said nearly 1,900 projects were underway--only to learn that no real work had been done on more than half of them, which had only received authorization by the school board.

Saying he was disappointed and embarrassed by the discrepancy, Soboroff introduced a new practice of setting quarterly goals.

By the end of June, the report said, 2,549 projects will have been started and 1,400--about 12% of the 11,975 planned--will have been completed. The work ranges from installing security screens on school windows to the purchase and installation of portable classrooms.

Looking back over some of the conflicts that dominated the first year of BB, the committee focused on the recent management restructuring as its most significant accomplishment.

Zacarias put a team of outside construction managers directly in charge of the contracting process, replacing district staff.

The oversight committee recommended that the Board of Education hire an outside firm to audit first-year expenses so that the new management team can get a fresh start.

The committee also recommended that the board hire an outside consultant to develop a master plan of the maintenance needs of all 660 campuses so that proper decisions can be made on how to spend limited funds.

Soboroff said the main problem now confronting the BB project is that the bond is too small to pay for all the work needed to upgrade the nation’s second-largest school system.

Proposition BB will provide $1.2 billion for repairs and improvements, $900 million for new schools and $300 million for portable classrooms. Soboroff said it would cost an estimated $6.8 billion to bring the district up to a reasonable standard.

In past meetings, committee members have harped on the lack of a master plan as they were asked to approve millions of dollars in funding for new schools without knowing if there would be enough money to complete the repair and improvement phase.

Taking its most forceful stand yet on the need for a master plan, the committee declined Wednesday to authorize spending $73 million on 645 portable classrooms that school officials said are urgently needed to accommodate an increase of 45,000 students over the past three years.

Committee members demanded to know how the portable classrooms reconciled with the plan to spend $900 million in BB funds on new school construction.

Though he painted a dire picture of increased student busing, longer bus trips and more schools going year-round, Assistant Supt. Gordon Wohlers got little sympathy.

“Why didn’t we get this two months ago?” asked David Barulich, who represents the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. on the committee. “We’re being made to feel like brutes if we don’t go along.”

“We’re talking here about not building a high school,” said structural engineer Richard Phillips. “We need to think about this.”

Architect Michael Lehrer said he didn’t want to look back 20 years from now at “a bunch of miserable new campuses built to solve immediate problems.”