The Stakes at Belmont

Julie Korenstein threw up her hands.

“I throw up my hands,” she said.

Korenstein was addressing the staff of the Los Angeles Unified School District. They sat in the district’s smudgy, fluorescent-lit, mold-scented boardroom. Outside, rain was falling gloomily. Inside, the district was trying to absorb its latest fiasco.

For a long moment, as Korenstein held her “throwing up my hands” gesture, no one said a word. She is the chairwoman of the board’s facilities committee that had just been delivered news so embarrassing--humiliating, actually--that everyone in the room seemed to cringe from dealing with it.

In a nutshell, the committee had been told that its massive, ludicrously expensive Belmont Learning Complex had been built, or half-built, on a toxic waste site. Further, the staff had been warned of the dangers years ago and done nothing about it. Finally, cleanup would cost untold millions if it was possible at all.

Toward the end of the report, the word “demolition” was used. Should the cleanup fail, the committee was told, the district might be forced to demolish some or all of the buildings constructed thus far on an old oil field downtown.

That’s when Korenstein threw up her hands. And waited. A slow parade of bureaucrats finally approached the podium. They amounted to the usual suspects, people responsible for making sure schools do not get built on sites loaded with petroleum hydrocarbons, leaking methane gas, hydrogen sulfide, and assorted other contaminants.

Then the telling moment took place. Not one of the officials accepted even partial blame for the financial disaster the district faced. Each came to the podium to explain that they had arrived late in the decision-making process, that their duties had caused them to be elsewhere when the damage was done, that somehow they were free of the taint.

Remember the old ditty? “Don’t blame you, don’t blame me, let’s blame Jimmy behind the tree.” Something like that.

And Korenstein let them off the hook. So did Vicki Castro and David Tokofsky, the other board members on the committee. One by one the bureaucrats approached the podium and, in effect, received absolution. The committee members listened, nodded sympathetically, and declared the meeting over.

Just another hard day of work at the district.

This particular set piece was spookily reminiscent of the description provided by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen in its 1997 audit of district operations. This review, one of the most damning I’ve ever read, said in part:

“District productivity is hampered by political gamesmanship and the maneuverings of the board, senior staff and their representatives. The lack of trust and respect among peers is evident through viewing their communications and looking at their actions toward each other. Congenial talk with limited real action and an abundance of protective memos seems to be the modus operandi.”

In other words, “congenial talk” is used to hide honest criticism and protective memos are used to dodge responsibility. No one trusts anyone but accountability is avoided at all costs.

You wonder how big a disaster will be required to produce a watershed change at the district. The Belmont situation follows a previous attempt to build a Central City high school on the site of the old Ambassador Hotel. That plan also failed and cost the district tens of millions of dollars.

And last year the district found itself with a toxic precursor to Belmont when the site of another new school, Jefferson Middle School, was found to contain various and sundry dangerous chemicals. As with Belmont, district officials had received ample warnings of the dangers at the Jefferson site and failed to heed them.

Here’s an excerpt from a report on Jefferson by Assemblyman Scott Wildman, the chairman of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee:

“The [district] began the process of purchasing the site during the summer of 1986. On Jan. 9, 1989, the California Department of Education approved the purchase of the project . . . despite their knowledge that serious toxic concerns existed at the site. The [district] conducted what the director of the Department of Toxic Substance Control characterized as an ‘insufficient’ toxic assessment and remediation effort at the site. . . . At no time did the [district] seek outside assistance as required until forced to do so by the state.”

So the stories repeat and repeat. They hit the news, make a splash for a few days, and then fade away. Not only does the district fail to make its own people accountable, the rest of us fail to make the district accountable. Of all cities, Los Angeles accepts its scandals with an amazing, numbing tolerance.

But, just maybe, Belmont will prove the last straw. Because, friends, this scandal is big. We are not talking about a nickel and dime middle school here. We’re talking about a “Learning Complex,” a project so huge and needlessly expensive that it will drain funds for dozens of other schools.

Some basic facts about Belmont. When presented to the board in 1995, the Belmont project was estimated at $55 million to $70 million to build. Those figures, already high, were explained by the presence of a retail component in the project. Designed to occupy the ground level of the school, the retail stores would return high rents to the district and thus reduce its costs over the long run.

Thus, Belmont was envisaged as a unique educational development. Belmont the school would serve as the core of a grander development, a partnership between the public and private sectors.

You will not be surprised to hear that costs subsequently grew. Little by little, the overruns mounted until they hit approximately $140 million. Those costs, of course, include construction only. The land for Belmont cost an additional $60 million, pushing the total to $200 million.

That’s why you often hear Belmont described as “the most expensive high school in the country.” A typical high school costs in the range of $130 to $150 per square foot to build. Belmont will cost somewhere around $300 per square foot.

But, you may be asking, what about the saving grace of the retail component? Well, it has yet to materialize and now looks very doubtful indeed. Belmont, you see, occupies a peculiar location. Squeezed on the east by the Harbor Freeway and on the north by the Hollywood Freeway, the Learning Complex is cut off from most of its natural constituencies. In a phrase, it is a terrible spot for retail and prospective companies have stayed away in droves.

Thus the grand financial design for Belmont has collapsed. In fact, it collapsed long ago. So foolhardy has been the plan and so uncertain have been its prospects that the State Allocation Board, which contributes state bond money for school construction, repeatedly refused to underwrite Belmont.

In a rational world, these setbacks would have produced a reevaluation of the project. At the very least, the board would have eliminated the retail component from the design, thus saving substantial construction costs. I mean, why would anyone build stores that will never be occupied?

But no. Construction began last year, all flags flying. If you drive by the site today, I guarantee you will be startled. What appears to be a light industrial park is rising next to downtown. It’s huge. Steel girders reach upward, surrounded on their lower reaches by stone facades. And down at street level sits the elegant, unwanted retail component.

More than any other board member, the champion of Belmont has been Vicki Castro. Criticize the cost, criticize the idiocy of the retail, and Castro usually goes into a “you’re either for the kids or against them” argument. And, surely, Los Angeles desperately needs a high school for children living near downtown.

But no one has argued that downtown should not get its high school. The issue, and the eternal mystery, is why the district spent so much money at Belmont that other construction projects surely will be starved to pay for it.

By its own account, the district needs to build 51 schools over the next two decades. Only the most math challenged would fail to see that a $200-million expenditure for one school will drain resources from others.

Except, of course, the $200-million figure doesn’t apply anymore. When the board approved the Belmont site, they knew they were building a school on an old oil field. Everybody knew it. Everybody said the problems should be checked out.

They weren’t, and now all of us must pay for the result. If we’re lucky, the costs will be contained to about $20 million. If we are unlucky, the rising structures at Belmont will be torn down and the district will abandon the site at a cost of approximately $150 million. And we will still have no high school for downtown.

Probably the outcome will fall somewhere in between. A cleanup cost of, say, $50 million on top of the $200 million in land and construction costs. We then will have managed to build exactly one high school for a total cost of about a quarter-billion dollars.

“My biggest fear is that the voters of California will see this kind of waste and refuse to support future bond measures for school construction,” said Assemblyman Wildman. “We need those 51 new schools in Los Angeles. To get them, we must demonstrate to the voters that we can spend their money wisely.”

Speaking of voters, four members of the board will come up for election this year. And in the year 2001, the other four will come up. Of the present board, only Tokofsky, Korenstein and George Kiriyama voted against the madness of Belmont.

We need a watershed. Choose wisely.