Belmont Backers Fail to Stand Up for Project

The commission weighing the fate of the environmentally plagued Belmont Learning Complex has been hampered in its job because no one has come forward to argue that the $200-million project should be completed, the panel’s staff director said Sunday.

In six weeks of testimony, the commission hasn’t heard one word from key school district officials, consultants and contractors who for years had run roughshod over any opposition to the high school project, the panel’s executive director, former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, said in an interview with The Times.

Saying that it was surprising and shameful that those responsible for Belmont would leave it dangling, Reiner added that he plans to “ratchet up” the pressure on district officials to speak up at a commission meeting today.

“There ought to be a sense of public responsibility,” Reiner said. “You ought to come forward and defend your project.”

The Board of Education appointed the commission in August to help it decide whether to finish or abandon the half-completed school. The commission is studying whether environmental mitigation can make the site safe for students and faculty at a reasonable cost. Reiner has promised an unequivocal recommendation by Oct. 20.

So far, the commission has heard from countless witnesses on the defects of the mammoth high school now rising on a former oil field west of downtown. Studies initiated after construction began have shown that explosive methane and potentially toxic hydrogen sulfide are pervasive on the 35-acre campus.

Meanwhile, senior school district staff members who support Belmont have refrained from testifying, presumably because they fear the possibility of discipline or prosecution, Reiner said. Last month, the district’s top auditor, Don Mullinax, recommended that nine senior officials be disciplined and an undetermined number be considered for criminal prosecution for allowing the project to go forward without adequate environmental review.

The resulting silence from its senior staff could put the school board in an awkward position if the commission favors completing Belmont, one board member said.

“It raises horrendous questions,” said board member David Tokofsky, who dissented in the 4-3 decision to launch Belmont in 1997. “If we send it out to a panel of experts who get less information than any other panel formed on Belmont has gotten, how could they recommend anything to us?”

In The Times’ interview, Reiner was especially critical of the silence by Kajima Urban Development, the managing firm of the partnership building the high school. Mullinax has referred the partnership, Temple Beaudry Partners, for either civil or criminal prosecution.

Reiner said the Japanese firm should step up and defend its project rather than risk the “stain on its international reputation” if Belmont is abandoned.

Instead, the firm has referred all questions from the commission to its law firm, Latham & Watkins. Reiner said last week that he called Latham & Watkins attorney Vic Antola, who flatly rejected an offer to state Kajima’s case for Belmont before the commission.

Antola’s attitude was “We have absolutely no interest in whether the [school district] goes forward with Belmont or not,” Reiner said.

“I apparently confused Kajima with someone who gives a damn,” Reiner said.

Antola did not respond to a message left at his home Sunday.

In the past, advocates of Belmont have pressed the case that the school is urgently needed to provide classrooms for thousands of students now being bussed to other schools many miles away.

Reiner said he understood why senior district staff might be gun-shy in the wake of the Mullinax recommendations, but argued that their public duty outweighs personal consideration.

“It is critical that the staff step forward and participate,” he said.