Top Officials Say Belmont Shouldn’t Be Used as School

The two top officials of the Los Angeles school district recommended Thursday that the district abandon the environmentally plagued Belmont Learning Complex and instead explore converting the half-completed high school into a new district headquarters.

“As a potential high school the Belmont Learning Complex, conceived in ignorance and nurtured by negligence, is a vortex of contamination that would continue to draw energy, resources, controversy and disaster,” Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller said in a recommendation distributed to board members Thursday. “It is time to decide, finally, that the site and buildings will not be used for a school, and move on.”

If approved by the Board of Education at next Tuesday’s meeting, the proposal would end a troubled saga that has cost more than $170 million so far and helped precipitate the overthrow of three board members and former Supt. Ruben Zacarias.

The board appears almost certain to kill Belmont, but the proposal to move district headquarters to the site probably will meet opposition. Two board members expressed concerns about the safety of the staff.

Interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who initially supported opening the new school, endorsed the plan, which was drafted by Miller. He said he concluded that the community cannot wait the five years it would take to correct Belmont’s environmental problems and complete construction.

The new high school would have helped relieve overcrowding in the densely populated Belmont neighborhood. Thousands of students from the area are bused to other neighborhoods, and Cortines said the district must find a quicker way to provide schools near their homes.

“We need to make every effort to have the seats available by September of this year,” Cortines said.

Miller’s bold recommendation follows a decision by the board last week to abandon plans for a new high school in South Gate, which also was to be built on contaminated land. The district stands to lose at least $25 million from that aborted project.

Miller said he based his Belmont decision primarily on cost rather than safety. Although it was uncertain whether the site could be made safe for children, Miller said, it was very clear the state would not contribute any more funds to the project.

The district cannot afford to spend another $55 million of its own to complete the construction and bear still unknown costs for environmental work.

“General funds are to run the basic educational mission of the district,” Miller said. “They pay for books, supplies, teacher salaries. General funds should not be used for school construction costs when bond money is available for alternate sites.”

Board member Julie Korenstein, an opponent of Belmont since its inception, applauded the decision.

“I just could not imagine how anyone in good conscience could have gone forward with the health and safety concerns,” Korenstein said. “Forever L.A. Unified and the board members who voted for it would have had that on their conscience.”

Board members Valerie Fields, David Tokofsky and Caprice Young said they too expect to support the recommendation, and board member Mike Lansing said he had not yet decided. Board president Genethia Hayes could not be reached Thursday, but has previously expressed strong reservations about completing the school.

Board member Victoria Castro, who has stood by the project through a year of escalating troubles, said she opposes the recommendation because it lacks detailed alternatives and cost comparisons.

Miller is proposing to make up for the loss of the 5,000-student Belmont complex by converting existing middle schools into high schools. Construction of kindergarten through third-grade primary centers would allow the district to turn existing elementary schools into schools that serve grades 4 through 8.

He also recommended consideration of other possible sites for a new high school, including the former Terminal Annex postal center downtown, vacant office buildings, the former Ambassador Hotel site in Mid-Wilshire and the current district headquarters at 450 N. Grand Ave., which he said could become a visual arts and humanities academy with connections to the nearby Music Center.

In an interview Thursday, Cortines said he also wants to consider mixing schools with commercial office space as he did in several New York buildings.

“I’m fishing, but we’ve got to find a solution,” Cortines said. “I think we have got to find some seats for those students within a year. I feel that I will have failed that community if we can’t do that.”

The lack of specific alternatives concerned board member Lansing.

“It needs to go far beyond suggestions,” he said. “It’s nice to say we have options, but the Belmont area has been given a lot of lip service to options for a long time.”

The proposal to move district headquarters onto the site is likely to meet some resistance.

Miller said it is conceivable that with the downsizing he and Cortines are working on, the entire central office could be relocated to Belmont. That would allow the district to vacate its dilapidated headquarters as well as move out of plush offices it occupies in a downtown high-rise.

He argued that the safety standard would be less stringent for adults, because unlike children, they are not “assigned as a matter of law to attend.”

But both Korenstein and Fields said Thursday that they oppose that idea.

“If it is not safe for the teaching staff and the administrative staff, then I don’t feel it would be safe for any other of our workers to be there, including me,” Fields said.

Belmont has been wrapped in controversy since the board voted in 1997 to award the construction contract to the highest of three bidders.

The school was nearly half complete last winter when it was disclosed that explosive methane posed a much bigger hazard than board members had been led to believe. That revelation touched off an internal audit that blamed nine senior district officials for allowing construction to begin without adequate environmental assessment.

The growing scandal played a key role in the defeat last spring of three board members by a slate of candidates backed by Mayor Richard Riordan.

With Belmont as the backdrop, disclosures last October that district staff were pressing ahead with the purchase of polluted land in South Gate proved to be the central issue in the board’s ouster of Zacarias.

The Belmont recommendation, which Miller called the most difficult of his career, represented a victory for two harsh district critics in the state Legislature, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblyman Scott Wildman (D-Los Angeles).

Hayden, who first proposed the use of Belmont for district headquarters last February, praised Cortines for having “not only an open mind but the great gift of being able to change his mind.”

Wildman, who had vowed to use his position on the state Allocation Board to block any further Belmont funding, said he will now work with the district to get state money for alternatives.

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