School Board Debates Belmont Center’s Uses

Nearly two years after awarding a developer a contract to build a combined high school and retail complex near downtown, members of the Los Angeles Board of Education continue to debate how the retail space should be used.

At a hearing Thursday on the Belmont Learning Complex, the developer finally presented a shopping center proposal that would include a grocery store, two restaurants, health clinics and shoe stores.

But school officials said they are still considering other uses for about 80,000 square feet of space that is being created for retail use beneath the high school, now rising just west of the Harbor Freeway on 1st Street.

The district could retain the space for its own use, such as conducting special classes for students who are falling behind, or lease it at less than market rates to nonprofit organizations that would serve the low-income Temple-Beaudry neighborhood, board members suggested.

Robert Niccum, head of the district’s real estate branch, said he would prepare an analysis of the three alternatives within 60 days.

Details of the retail plan, presented to the board’s facilities committee in a confidential report, remained sketchy.

Representatives of the developer, Temple-Beaudry Partners, declined to identify the prospective tenants or say how much rent the leases would bring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, saying disclosure could harm negotiations.

The initial proposal, adopted by the board in April 1997, assumed that rent from the commercial center would pay for a $7-million concrete platform constructed on the hillside site as a raised foundation for classroom buildings.

Ray Rodriguez, administrative coordinator for the project, said the numbers in the current proposal are “not what we want them [to be] yet,” but that he expects further negotiations to be fruitful.

The developer’s marketing agent, Jose Legaspi, told the board that the proposed health clinics represented an attempt to provide services desired in the low-income Temple-Beaudry neighborhood, even though other tenants might pay more rent.

In a harshly worded letter, Malcolm Riley, a shopping center developer who is a member of a volunteer committee set up to oversee development of the complex, said he did not see how the proposed retail plan could succeed.

Riley said the natural marketing area for the stores would be cut off by freeways and that the inconvenience of a multilevel parking structure would deter motorists from shopping at the grocery store. Riley characterized the retail plan as a subsidy of the tenants by the district.

Legaspi defended the plan as being appropriate to a densely populated, low-income neighborhood rather than the suburban settings with which Riley has experience.