School District to Reinstate 5 Blamed in Belmont Fiasco

Five of the nine Los Angeles school district employees who were blamed for the Belmont Learning Complex debacle will soon return to work after being on paid leave for about a year.

A memo from Supt. Roy Romer indicated that the five employees had agreed to unpaid suspensions and new assignments. District officials would not comment on the lengths of the suspensions or whether the new assignments would be demotions.

A sixth employee has retired.

Romer recommended the reinstatements after reviewing the cases and determining that the employees did not deserve termination.

“While Belmont will never be a model for how business should be conducted in the future, I concluded that those most responsible for Belmont are no longer at the district or never were employees of the district,” Romer said.

The employees were placed on leave in October 1999, after the district’s inspector general, Don Mullinax, issued a report concluding that they had failed to properly supervise the project, which was plagued by environmental problems and cost overruns.

Mullinax referred his Belmont investigation to Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti with a recommendation for criminal prosecution, but he declined to publicly name anyone suspected of a crime. Garcetti’s office later declined to prosecute, a fact that Romer said influenced his decision.

“When the report was first issued, there was significant concern that serious misconduct had occurred,” Romer wrote in an Oct. 3 memo to the board. “Further investigation has since been conducted both by criminal authorities, which declined to pursue the matter, and by our counsel.”

The Board of Education, which killed the Belmont high school project in January, is set to ratify the agreements with the employees on Tuesday.

One of the six employees criticized the district’s protracted handling of the cases.

“To me, they handled it foolishly,” said Roger Friermouth, project manager for Belmont. “These people have been on leave for over a year at full salary. Now they’re going to give them a slap on the hands and anywhere from 5 to 20 days’ suspension?”

Friermouth retired in August rather than continue to fight for his job. He said he and the five who will return to work deserve to have their old jobs back.

Mullinax launched his Belmont probe after it was reported that district employees began construction on the $200-million project knowing that its environmental hazards had not been adequately studied.

Subsequent investigations concluded that potentially explosive methane and toxic hydrogen sulfide are endemic to the 35-acre site on a former oil field. A mitigation plan to make the site safe was projected to cost tens of millions of dollars.

But the school board sided with a minority of commissioners who said they doubted the site could ever be safe for schoolchildren and voted in January to abandon the nearly completed project.

Mullinax issued a second report last December in which he said there was evidence of criminal conduct by contractors on the job. That report also was forwarded to the district attorney’s office, which is still evaluating the material.

Of the employees named in the first Mullinax report, general counsel Richard K. Mason and chief administrative officer David Koch both accepted buyouts in October 1999. Coordinator Raymond Rodriguez resigned to take a job for a private firm.

The remaining six, placed on leave last October, were Diane Doi, deputy director of environmental health and safety; Friermouth; Beth Louargand, general manager of the facilities services division; Richard Lui, safety officer; Robert Niccum, director of real estate and asset management; and Susie Wong, director of the environmental health and safety branch.

Another employee who had primary responsibility for Belmont retired in January 1998, well before the Mullinax report was issued. Dominic Shambra, the former director of the office of planning and development, oversaw the project from its approval by the board in 1997 through most of its construction.