Romer’s Chance on Belmont

The Belmont Learning Complex is all too well known as the unfinished high school built without adequate health and safety protections on an abandoned oil field loaded with environmental hazards. Can the campus ever be made safe? Can students attend school there with no danger from the potentially explosive methane gas and deadly hydrogen sulfide gas found on the site?

Los Angeles Supt. Roy Romer is betting that private businesses can come up with unimpeachable answers and a plan, within a reasonable time and at a desirable cost. Even if there are no takers to clean up the site or buy it outright, the process of soliciting bids at least and at long last should lead to a final determination on Belmont.

The status of the campus should have been resolved shortly after The Times in February of 1999 revealed shortcomings in the environmental review process. Numerous experts offered conflicting findings, and the project was abandoned in January by the Los Angeles school board in a 5-2 vote that reflected concerns about health, safety, liability and cost. Revisiting Belmont required Romer to persuade two of the five opponents to support his proposal. On Tuesday, board President Genethia Hayes and member Caprice Young joined with Mike Lansing and Victoria Castro, who represents the neighborhoods immediately west of downtown where the new campus and the overcrowded old Belmont High School are located. Romer got the margin he needed. Now, can he deliver answers that end all the questions?

The former governor of Colorado cites the cleanup of Rocky Flats, a former nuclear weapons plant about 16 miles from downtown Denver. The main contractor, Kaiser-Hill, is ahead of schedule on the job, which includes decontaminating a plutonium recovery area, but not without problems. In October, the U.S. Department of Energy fined the company $250,000 for worker safety violations, and earlier this month as many as 10 workers were exposed to low levels of radiation from an unidentified source. Such a track record would not squelch doubts about a district that couldn’t build a school right in the first place.

The Belmont project has already cost at least $150 million. The Los Angeles Unified School District must move beyond this divisive stalemate. On Tuesday finally came some good news related to Belmont: The district is hoping to buy the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce building, which could house 800 students. That wouldn’t solve the problem of classroom space for the 4,874 students who are shoehorned into the old campus or the additional 1,500 who are bused away. But, because it’s extraordinary to have anything positive associated with the LAUSD school expansion program, it’s a welcome start.