4 of 7 on L.A. Unified Board Inclined to Scrap Belmont

Facing at last a final decision on the fate of the environmentally plagued Belmont Learning Complex, a majority of Los Angeles Board of Education members say they are prepared to abandon the half-completed project and to look for another site on which to build a downtown high school.

Four of the seven board members said they have deep reservations about the effectiveness of costly solutions proposed to remediate explosive methane and toxic hydrogen sulfide on the former oil field west of downtown.

“I’m not going to wake up 10 years from now and hear somebody tell me the school blew up,” board President Genethia Hayes said.

Several board members said they would be reluctant to send their own children or grandchildren to the school, and therefore did not want to be responsible for requiring other children to go there.

With the vote now expected as early as Nov. 16, all board members said they are keeping their options open. But several said they were not swayed by a commission vote last month narrowly recommending that the project proceed.

“I am inclined not to move forward,” board member Caprice Young said. “In order to move forward, it would have taken a strong recommendation from the commission.”

If the board scraps the Belmont project, it will face the daunting task of finding clean land and building from scratch one or more schools in the densely populated downtown area, which district sources say could take five to seven years.

Meanwhile, the need is expected to grow. Parents and local leaders have grown increasingly frustrated by overcrowding at the current school, about three blocks away, and by the busing of thousands of students from the area. The situation is expected to worsen with future enrollment increases.

Hayes said district staff has already begun the search for new sites. Some board members said they are considering the district’s downtown headquarters and the former Terminal Annex post office as possible locations.

It remains unclear what would be done with the complex of nearly completed buildings at Temple Street and Beaudry Avenue west of downtown.

Acknowledging that the property could be difficult to sell while under an environmental cloud, some board members said they expected state-supervised studies to continue.

They would not rule out giving a go-ahead for construction to resume later if the site receives a nearly absolute guarantee of safety by the state. Under that scenario, Belmont would become a second new downtown-area high school.

The board put off a decision on the $200-million project in July when it appointed the commission to study Belmont’s environmental issues and make a recommendation.

The commission, headed by former state Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, voted 4 to 3 last month, with a strongly worded dissent, to recommend completing the school.

The decision left the question as muddled as ever, partly because commissioners on both sides of the vote agreed on several points that diminished the arguments for moving ahead. They concluded, for example, that because of high remediation costs, completing Belmont would be just as expensive as building a replacement. They also agreed that the environmental work would delay the opening of the school, once set for next July, an additional five or more years.

The commission’s nonvoting executive director, former Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, further weakened the recommendation by voicing his own opinion that the school should never open.

To make Belmont safe, environmental consultants recommend costly pipe collection and venting systems as well as barriers under buildings and even under playing fields.

After hearing conflicting reports on the extent of remediation needed to make the campus safe, the commission endorsed the most costly plan, with a price of $35 million to $60 million over the life of the school.

Hayes said she was put off by the price tag and by the conflicting views on how safe the school could be, particularly considering the district’s poor record on maintaining equipment such as that prescribed for Belmont.

“I don’t want to hear that it is 85% safe,” Hayes said. “If I am not satisfied that the school can guarantee me an extremely high degree of safety and extremely low mitigation cost, you can’t get my vote to go forward.”

Julie Korenstein, one of three board members who opposed the project’s approval in 1997, said her view has never wavered.

“I would not want my granddaughter to go there, so why would I want anybody else to go there?” Korenstein said.

Board member David Tokofsky, also one of the original dissenters, said he is concerned about wasting the $170 million already sunk into the school, but currently is “leaning 4-1” against continuing.

Even Belmont’s most loyal supporter, board member Victoria Castro, said she is resigned to its defeat, and now hopes to gain the board’s commitment to a time line, cost and quality standards for an alternative high school.

“If it’s a no vote, with that no vote needs to be coupled the alternative,” Castro said. “That’s how I would hope they look at it, instead of a quick no.”

The remaining two board members, Valerie Fields and Mike Lansing, said they are withholding a decision until they read the reports of the Belmont commission.

Lansing added, though, that among his concerns of safety, cost and the need for schools in the area, the deciding factor for him will probably be the potential for lawsuits against the district if Belmont opens.

Lansing said he wants advice from the district’s attorneys on the full spectrum of potential liability.

In the past, Fields has said she was leaning against completing the school in light of studies completed in spring which found that methane and hydrogen sulfide are pervasive across the 35-acre site and cannot be eliminated because they are constantly being generated by underground crude oil.

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

Some board members said they favored Reiner’s proposal to use the district’s headquarters, only a few blocks from the new Belmont site, as a replacement. Reiner suggested that state funding would be available for much of the cost and that the site could be reconfigured in about two years.

“I don’t mind moving,” Young said. “You can put offices anywhere.”

But Lansing said he would consider the headquarters as only a new school site, not a replacement for the 5,000-student Belmont school. Another campus would have to be found, he said.

The board has so far had no discussions on how to dispose of the Belmont site if it stops construction, and the commission did not study that question.

However, Korenstein said she had received a query from the backers of a proposal to build a $3.5-billion complex of hotels, movie theaters and offices called City of Angels.

Young said she would be open to a compromise that would keep Belmont alive, at least in theory, while the district completes its remediation study under supervision of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control.

“Until we get a clear picture of the environmental, we can’t get a picture of alternate uses, or how to sell the site,” Young said.