Belmont Could Be Abandoned, 6 on Board Say

Marking a dramatic shift, a majority of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s newly constituted board now say they are prepared to “bite the bullet” and consider abandoning the $200-million Belmont Learning Complex project if costs of making it environmentally safe continue to escalate.

As the newly elected board prepared to take office today, members left the door open to completing the high school if they can be assured that the environmental fixes can make it close to 100% safe for students and staff at a reasonable cost.

Several acknowledged that if the school does not open, it will be difficult to meet the district’s obligation to provide more classrooms for the densely populated downtown neighborhood. Others expressed reservations about sacrificing the $115 million already spent on the project, construction of which is continuing and is more than half complete.

But, after several months of controversy in which a majority of the board stood behind the project, six of the seven board members said in interviews that they would at least consider not completing the school. Board member Victoria M. Castro, long the school’s most unbending supporter, did not return calls from The Times.

Newly elected board member Genethia Hayes, who is widely expected to be elected board president in the new board’s first order of business today, said she is “leaning against continuing the project” and believes the district needs to show the will and ability to correct a “monumental mistake.”

“We still have an obligation to the taxpayers to say we’re not going to keep throwing money down a rat hole,” Hayes said.

Incumbent board member Julie Korenstein, who opposed the Belmont project from its inception, and incumbent Valerie Fields, who has not taken a position in the past, also said they now lean toward stopping the project.

Ironically, board member David Tokofsky, who has been one of Belmont’s most vocal critics since his election in 1995, is now one of the more supportive of finishing it.

Even if the district tries to sell it off, he said, it would have to sink more money into it for remediation because “there is no one dumb enough--except us--to buy it ‘as is.’ ”

“I’m not a nihilist,” Tokofsky said. “I think the project stinks. Always has, always will stink. But how do I go to people and say, ‘I said it stinks, but now I’m telling you we truly have lost $170 million?’ ”

Newly elected board members Mike Lansing and Caprice Young said the board will have to study whether to kill the project. Young, like Tokofsky, said she would like to halt construction for three months or more to allow the district staff to grapple with the many unknowns surrounding the project.

The board members they replaced were divided on Belmont. Jeff Horton strongly supported it and George Kiriyama was an opponent.

The Belmont complex is being built on an old oil field that continues to emit potentially explosive methane. Last November, district officials asked their new environmental safety team to investigate reports of methane encountered by construction crews at the Belmont site. Last week the team concluded that methane is pervasive across the 35-acre site and cannot be eliminated. The report prescribed what it said would be expensive measures to make the school safe but added that the board would be justified if it decided to scrap the project.

That report was a turning point, said Fields, who said she had a “big knot in my stomach” as she heard the report’s conclusions.

Like many other board members, Hayes said she is willing to commit more funds to rescue the project, but not $20 million or $30 million more. She said she wants the school staff to provide the board “hard and fast numbers” quickly.

So far, the safety team said it cannot provide definitive cost estimates, but its working estimate is close to $10 million.

“I know that in talking with other board members . . . they’re ready to bite the bullet if that’s what’s called for,” Hayes said.

Deciding the fate of Belmont will be one of the biggest problems facing the new board and promises to cut short the customary honeymoon.

Hayes said the issue will provide a test of how well the new board gels. Tokofsky said its outcome may dictate whether the district survives intact or gets broken up by a frustrated public.

Young, sounding a similar note, said the district has to show the public that it can come to grips with Belmont to earn the confidence necessary to proceed with a massive school construction program calling for 100 or 150 new schools to handle the city’s increasing school-age population.

“Belmont is just a case study,” Young said. “The wrong decision was made at every turn. The real challenge is, how do we build 100 schools in the next five years when we have no system to do it?”

As for the immediate issue, Young said “there are still some big pieces of the puzzle that haven’t been resolved.”

“What would it cost to have a serious mitigation system that would actually work versus what would it cost to . . . find some alternative use, and build another school or two schools? That cost-benefit analysis has not been done. That is what needs to be done next.”

Some board members say they will consider demanding lawsuits against outside parties to recover costs.

“There are lots of people who can be and should be sued, and hopefully we can recoup millions and millions of dollars and sell the property for a lesser use,” Fields said.

Completed or not, many said, Belmont probably will be the last of the big high schools. Both because of the scarcity of urban land and educational research favoring smaller campuses, the trend will be for more schools sprinkled throughout the city on smaller parcels.

And already, other uses are being considered for the giant downtown edifice rising at 1st Street and Beaudry Avenue.

Among the ideas being floated are to convert the structure into a warehouse--or a new administration building.

Fields, for one, offered little support for that idea. Asked if she would show up for board meetings at the converted structure, she responded: “Not unless I get assurances that I won’t be poisoned or blown up. My life is worth as much as anybody else’s.”

* PROP. 227 ABUSE ALLEGED

L.A. schools are abusing Prop. 227 by still teaching some pupils in Spanish, report says. B3