SPECIAL REPORT * In the year since Prop. BB was passed, fewer than half of the scheduled projects have begun. With the public increasingly examining L.A. Unified's way of doing business, the bond measure has begun . . . Building (Slowly) for the Future

By DOUG SMITH

March 29, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES EDUCATION WRITER

From the moment Los Angeles voters approved the largest school bond in the nation’s history last April, the pressure for results has been relentless.

For the Los Angeles Unified School District, the ability to borrow $2.4 billion for repair and construction represented an equally dramatic opportunity and risk. If the district handled the money well, it would spruce up its image as a bumbling bureaucracy by quickly making schools look better. If the district failed, it would worsen the widespread cynicism about public schools.

As the first anniversary of Proposition BB approaches next week after a year of decidedly mixed results, no one is reaching for the champagne.

“No cake. Next year, maybe,” said a rueful Steven Soboroff, chairman of the volunteer committee that oversees the bond spending. “This is not a celebratory time. It’s more of a reflecting time to make sure we do it better in the future.”

Putting the best face on a year that produced more contrapuntal shouting than the hammering and sawing sounds that the public expected, Proposition BB officials are preparing next week to report a qualified success.

So far, 1,407 repair jobs have gotten underway, fewer than half the 3,264 scheduled to begin by now.

Only 814 have been completed. That’s about 8% of the 10,689 promised in a five-year plan for a billion dollars in repairs and improvements that won a larger-than-anticipated 71% approval from voters.

Among the finished projects are the refurbishment of a bathroom at Couer d’Alene Elementary School in Venice; the installation of new air conditioning at Sylmar, Grant and Van Nuys high schools in the San Fernando Valley; and the installation of new boilers at Dana Middle School in San Pedro.

But beneath such concrete achievements lies a more disturbing story of bureaucratic manipulation, potential contracting scandal and persistent complaints that many schools’ needs are being ignored.

Adding to consternation over repairs, the district has yet to produce a facilities plan detailing how it will spend another billion dollars, set aside from Proposition BB for building new schools.

The hand-wringing over these questions has slowed the physical work. Yet it has contributed something unexpected and intangible that may prove to be Proposition BB’s most far-reaching achievement: a still unfolding public examination of how L.A. Unified does business, and how it could do it better.

The debate--fueled almost entirely by the citizens oversight committee that was created by Proposition BB to assuage voter skepticism--has been loud and messy. It has pitted an entrenched bureaucracy against oversight committee members who are led by Soboroff, a political ally of L.A. Unified’s most public critic, Mayor Richard Riordan.

“You can’t take $2.4 billion and 10,000 contracts and move them through a system that hasn’t been maintaining itself for 20 years,” said Soboroff in a blanket declaration of his distrust of the district.

The conflict is over who should control the work: the L.A. Unified staffers who drew up the repair list or the oversight committee’s preference--a team of outside construction managers who came on board in June but have yet to be given more than a fraction of the jobs.

After months of ups and downs, the advantage appeared to shift to the oversight committee last month when Supt. Ruben Zacarias made it known that he would move aside the district administrators who crafted the bond measure and who nursed it to success at the polls.

They will be replaced by the team of outside managers that those district staffers hired in June to assist them in managing Proposition BB.

But like other “victories” by the upstarts, the promised results continue to be stalled in the L.A. Unified administration, meaning that the shouting probably won’t abate soon.

The Board of Education added the oversight group to the bond measure after failing to obtain two-thirds voter approval for a large bond measure in 1996.

Board members conceived of the committee as a kind of paper tiger that would review their decisions--after the money was spent. But beginning last spring, the 11-member committee grabbed a much more powerful role, assisted by a court ruling that its recommendation was needed before money could be spent.

In the lead were a triumvirate of politically savvy appointees from widely divergent backgrounds who sometimes squabbled among themselves but more often found their themes of distrust in perfect resonance.

Soboroff, a Westside real estate developer, has at times led the committee with a potent and quixotic personality as he sought to impose a fervent free-enterprise philosophy on the district bureaucracy.

Soboroff sees the role of the committee as nothing short of changing the way L.A. Unified does business--doing it so efficiently and openly, he imagines, that jaded voters will be willing to dig into their pockets once again to finish the job.

David Barulich, a representative of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., harbors no such optimism. He brings to the table the cynicism of a veteran watchdog.

“I came into this expecting things not to work very well because I’ve been an observer of the district for a decade,” Barulich said.

Dissatisfaction Rises

As counterpoint to those extremes, Timothy Lynch, deputy Los Angeles city controller, introduced an insider’s knowledge of efficient government, which he increasingly found lacking in the school district administration.

“We have not been happy about the way the contracting has been administered, the more we learn about it,” Lynch said.

Their dissatisfaction focused on the school district’s Facilities Services Branch, headed by Beth Louargand, a steely calm administrator who has absorbed the criticism--both direct and whispered--with a poker face.

Louargand has been chastised for doing too much and doing too little; for moving too quickly and moving too slowly.

But she has earned the begrudging respect of her critics for having the first surge of bond repair work ready to go almost as soon as the votes were in, far outstripping the pace in any other American city that had large school bond projects in this decade.

“Just to put it in perspective, when the state of California passed a major bond measure to repair seismically needy bridges, it took until after the Northridge quake [four years later] until they got around to some of them,” Lynch said.

But this early success contained the seeds of later dissatisfaction. The district’s list of 11,000 projects drew criticism for what was on it as well as what wasn’t, and its estimated costs.

The first blowup started within a month of the vote, when a group of utilities came forward with a proposal offering to install air conditioning in about 300 schools more quickly and for less money than the district.

Soboroff was ecstatic about what became known as “fast-track” air conditioning.

The district responded coolly, setting up a bidding process that has yet to conclude nearly 10 months later. Several of the initial 11 bidders were cut by the district; others dropped out, saying they thought they were being used as pawns by the district facilities division. They were convinced the bureaucracy wanted to keep the work under its thumb.

Soboroff, who had similar suspicions, declared victory in February when Zacarias blessed a plan for two remaining bidders to share the work.

Since then, however, the district negotiators rejected one of them; talks with the other, expected to take only a week, drag on.

“It’s exactly what I predicted,” Barulich of the Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. said. “I predicted they were going to kill fast-track by slow-tracking the negotiations. I’m not privy to the negotiations, but I’m not sure they’re being done in good faith.”

All the drama over air conditioning--which, at $185 million, represents about 20% of the repair projects--proved only a prelude to a bigger struggle: control over the entire contracting process.

Members of the committee have increasingly found fault with Louargand’s plan, which attained start-up speed by breaking the huge repair effort into thousands of individual tasks such as replacing bad piping, installing security grilles or repairing leaky roofs. Each job had its own price tag, and many could be done by district maintenance staff.

Needs Overlooked

One potentially explosive concern is the growing evidence that the repair list, created by combining deferred maintenance demands with each principal’s wish list, missed many glaring needs, such as dilapidated bathrooms and poor lighting.

After hearing complaints late last year from students in some South-Central Los Angeles high schools that their campuses were being shortchanged, the committee concluded that some principals were simply less aggressive than others or less alert to facilities’ problems.

They badgered Louargand into sending a letter to all principals asking them to review their repair lists and ask for anything they thought had been overlooked.

Requests have been forwarded by nearly half the district’s schools, raising the possibility that the $1.2 billion set aside for repairs could fall short even if all the jobs scheduled come in at budget.

Any overrun in repair bills could cascade into the second phase of Proposition BB, as the district begins building campuses to relieve overcrowding.

Whatever trust remained between the committee and school administration unraveled late last year after Soboroff gave a glowing report to the school board on Proposition BB progress.

Using statistics provided by the facilities division, Soboroff reported that 1,894 jobs--representing about 10% of the value of the $1.2-billion repair and improvement funds--were underway by Dec. 1.

It turned out that number was grossly inflated.

To enhance the apparent progress, the district counted projects authorized by the board, even when no work had been done.

A Times computer analysis of the program manager’s records showed that of 703 jobs scheduled to be completed by Dec. 1, only 55% had begun and only 59% of those in progress had started on time.

Soboroff was outraged--and even more outraged when he learned that three-quarters of the 4,432 assigned projects were being designed and put out to bid by Louargand’s staff, while the 10 project managers hired by the district had been given only a quarter of the work.

Soboroff exploded during the committee’s January meeting, grilling each of the 10 project managers on whether they were satisfied with the volume of work they had received.

In a painful display of fence-straddling, the project managers, technically employees of the district, alternately said they were happy with the status quo, but would certainly like more work.

Privately, several project managers interviewed by The Times said they saw no problem with the district staff managing the numerous small painting, electrical and plumbing jobs. Their firms were more suited to large projects such as laying asphalt and installing communication systems at hundreds of schools.

After the January meeting, committee members concluded that a fundamental change was needed with a shift of primary contracting responsibility to the project managers.

They got more ammunition with last month’s disclosure that the district attorney was investigating the district staff’s practice of splitting large jobs, such as the painting of a school, into small pieces. The apparent attempt was to make the jobs small enough to evade competitive bidding requirements.

A Times analysis showed that more than 20 companies had received from two to more than a dozen jobs for similar work on the same campus, all slightly below the threshold.

Whether or not the investigation uncovers any criminal offense, Soboroff said, it dramatizes the reason for turning the contracting over to private enterprise.

Having extracted from Zacarias a commitment to do that, an elated Soboroff believes that the door has at last been opened to the unfettered exercise of imagination from the project management team, whose members have so far been whipsawed by the political debate.

Clearly, though, it won’t happen without more tension, as the ethos of private enterprise intersects with the culture of big bureaucracy.

Already, project managers foresee a clash between efficient contracting and the district’s ingrained culture of responding to political needs by being sure that some sort of construction project is doled out to each campus each year.

Over the next year, the project managers will be looking for ways to package the 11,000 individual jobs by trade or by school, even if that means some schools do not get their repairs till later and some have to endure more frequent intrusions by work crews.

This is the kind of flexibility that fills Soboroff with confidence.

“When history looks back on BB, it will look upon it as a success, with bumps,” Soboroff said.

Barulich, the taxpayer advocate, has little faith that the district’s high level of diligence inspired by Proposition BB will last long after the public scrutiny subsides.

He finds it telling that one of the committee’s most applauded proposals--using community beautification groups to help design and plant gardens on school playgrounds in place of asphalt--has languished.

A Push for Aesthetics

Despite widespread endorsements, few schools have asked to reexamine their contracts for asphalt replacement,. Meanwhile, at the committee’s insistence, the district put many asphalt projects on hold.

“We gave it a push, but until the principals at the school sites really believe there is a commitment to take care of the greenery, they are not going to be willing to take the initiative,” Barulich said.

BB committee member Michael Lehrer, president-elect of the American Institute of Architects, worries that all the BB money will prove to have been wasted if it fails to make schools look like the important civic buildings they are.

Lehrer’s angst focuses on the wire mesh security grilles, built in the district’s central shop and being bolted by district staff to every first floor window in every school in a classic factory operation.

He wonders if they are necessary “in a time when crime is going down and people are inclined to making our schools centerpieces in their communities as opposed to places that exude all our fears.” Lehrer has proposed that the district hire architects to at least give the screens the style of Mexican courtyard windows whose grilles are a part of their charm.

And while they’re at it, he suggested, why not have designers come up with color schemes for schools to break the monopoly of muddy beige?

“Everybody seems to be open to this,” he said. “But how you institutionalize it, I don’t know. It makes a big difference when somehow there is a sense of mission at the top.”

If it were to happen, a part of that mission would include slowing the modest momentum that Proposition BB has achieved, not to mention redoing some of the work already done.

Monday: Questions of equity plague bond planners.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Prop. BB Numbers

Date passed: April 8, 1997

Margin of victory: 715-29%

Value of bonds: $2.4 billion

Cost to taxpayers: $66 per average home during first year.

Individual projects: 10,689

Projects underway: 1,407

Value: $160 million

Projects finished: 814

Value: $46 million