Panel Forming to Weigh Fate of Belmont Center

Retired state Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso and former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner are the standout names on a list of mostly obscure public servants nominated Wednesday to weigh the fate of the Belmont Learning Complex.

The school board wants the group to recommend within two months whether the environmentally plagued downtown high school, now more than half complete, can ever be made safe for students and staff.

After rushing to complete background checks on the proposed commission members, Los Angeles school officials identified six of the seven nominees late in the day.

If confirmed, Reynoso will be joined by a former state senator, a union leader and three public officials on the volunteer commission. Reiner is proposed as the group’s chief counsel and executive director, a paid position separate from the seven-member commission.

The seventh commissioner is expected to be named Friday when the Board of Education has scheduled a special meeting to make the appointments formal.

In its first major decision since three new board members shaped a reform-minded majority this spring, the board voted last month to slow construction on the $200-million project and create a commission to evaluate its environmental problems.

The school is being built over a former oil field. Recent investigations have shown that explosive methane and toxic hydrogen sulfide are pervasive across the 35-acre site and will continue to be generated by underground crude oil.

The school district’s environmental safety team has recommended a costly system of collector pipes and blowers to vent the dangerous gases.

Ultimately, board members must decide whether they are confident the system will work for the life of the school and whether the cost, estimated to be at least $10 million now and $100,000 annually, is justifiable.

Those concerns are balanced by the equally grim prospect of finding a better site for a badly needed downtown high school and returning to square one in the planning and construction.

Board members said last month they hoped to assemble a group of such irreproachable standing that their judgment would inspire the popular support needed to either complete or abandon the project. As the model, they cited the Christopher Commission, named for former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, which recommended an overhaul of the Los Angeles Police Department’s procedures after the 1992 riots.

The commission was four weeks in the making.

“The timeline imposed by the board majority pushed us to shorten the length of our search,” said board member David Tokofsky, who led the effort.

Besides Reynoso, a Supreme Court justice from 1976 to 1982, and Reiner, who was district attorney from 1981 to 1984, the most notable nominee is Charles Calderon, a state senator from 1982 to 1998.

In the senate, Calderon was chairman of the toxics and public safety and judiciary committees. He currently is president of the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture.

Reynoso has returned to private law practice and is a professor of law at UCLA and vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Reiner is in private practice as a partner in the law firm of Riley & Reiner.

The other proposed commissioners are: Craig A. Perkins, director of environmental and public works management for Santa Monica; Ira H. Monosson, former chief public health medical officer for the California Division of Occupational Safety & Health Administration; Maribel Marin, Los Angeles City Board of Public Works commissioner, and Janett Humphries, president of the Los Angeles City and County School Employee International Union, Local 99.

“Each one of them has tremendous experience with the nuts and bolts issues of everything from sewage to cancers to all of the problems that are at issue in terms of the health and safety of students in a school,” Tokofsky said.

A three-page charge to the commission, also on Friday’s agenda, sets out 20 questions “focusing on the immediate issues relating to whether or not to complete the project.”

Tokofsky said he and the other board members on the committee that drafted the document also saw a larger role for the commission, but did not think it could be accomplished within the two-month deadline.

“That would have been an exhaustive thing: how do you assess what the district does poorly, so-so, and excellently and how do you restructure the organization?” Tokofsky said.

He said it is likely that once the the initial recommendations are in, the commission will be asked to expand its mission.

Reiner, reached Wednesday night, said his immediate concern is getting the job done on time.

“The commission will come back with an unambiguous recommendation,” Reiner said. “It will be supportable and it will be on deadline. You have to etch that one in stone. It will be on deadline.”