Calling a Halt at Belmont

Howard Miller, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles public schools, has recommended abandoning the environmentally plagued Belmont Learning Center as a school--the correct decision. Interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, in a courageous change of mind, supports this tough call to pull the plug on the uncompleted high school, which sits on an abandoned oil field tainted with potentially explosive methane and toxic hydrogen sulfide. Together the two officials propose turning the complex into administrative offices and warehouses, which could be built to a more lenient environmental standard.

The school board, expected to act Tuesday, should heed the advice of the district’s new leadership team.

Miller, a real estate lawyer and former school board president, got it right when he told board members Thursday that the school, “conceived in ignorance and nurtured by negligence, is a vortex of contamination that would continue to draw energy, resources, controversy and disaster.” The project has become a money pit, and there’s no guarantee that the campus would open safely in five years or ever.

The Belmont controversy has remade the school board, contributed to the recent buyout of former Supt. Ruben Zacarias, forced out other high-ranking school district officials and triggered investigations into mismanagement, conflicts of interest, negligence and the possibility of criminal actions.

The project has cost the district more than $170 million, robbing the general fund of money that should have been spent on instruction. Schools should be constructed with bond money, state and local, and there is plenty of that available. Belmont, dogged by controversy, received no state or local bond funds. The children and parents and other taxpayers of the district got robbed. The people who made the decisions that led to this state of affairs should be held responsible.

The decision to abandon the school will anger parents who have long been promised a new neighborhood high school, one that would eliminate the busing of thousands of students to distant campuses. Parents want to know what the alternative will be, and Miller is already suggesting other sites, including that of the nearby school board headquarters.

Yes, promises have been broken and a new high school is urgently needed. So is a new way of doing business that gets children off buses without wasting money or jeopardizing their health, and Thursday’s recommendations move in the right direction. It is time for the Belmont controversy to end.