Cooley Reveals New Evidence on Belmont Center

Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Tuesday that he has received fresh evidence suggesting that environmental laws may have been broken by those who planned and built the Belmont Learning Complex.

Cooley’s comments directly contradict conclusions reached by his predecessor, Gil Garcetti, who had determined that no laws were broken in the Belmont case.

A new task force set up by Cooley is reviewing more than 70 investigative reports recently turned over by Los Angeles Unified School District’s inspector general, Don Mullinax. The reports are drawn from interviews with participants in the project.

The task force is also reexamining files Mullinax sent previously to the district attorney’s office.

“There’s an indication there may have been environmental laws broken,” Cooley told reporters Tuesday during a briefing at his downtown office.

Cooley’s task force is investigating alleged environmental crimes by school district officials, the school’s developer and environmental consulting firms.

The head of the task force said he, too, sees promise in the new files.

“It’s exceptional information,” said Anthony Patchett, a retired prosecutor who is working on the project. “We are looking at environmental criminal violations. There appears to be substantial evidence.”

Last April, Garcetti declined to pursue charges stemming from alleged environmental lapses at the half-finished high school near downtown. His deputies said they could not find evidence that any misdemeanors or felonies had been committed. But the prosecutors never asked for the 70 reports, Mullinax said.

The Los Angeles city attorney and the California attorney general also refused to file charges at the time; neither agency could find evidence of any crimes.

Mullinax said he was pleased that the district attorney was reviewing the new reports.

“I think it’s going to be good to have a fresh set of eyes take a look at this,” he said. “Someone needs to go out and re-interview these people and put this thing behind us once and for all.”

Belmont has followed a tortured path since its inception several years ago, spawning lawsuits and drawing ridicule from the public and politicians alike.

The Board of Education decided last January to abandon the costly project over concerns about explosive methane gas and toxic hydrogen sulfide in the ground. The school sits over a former oil field.

Earlier this month, the school board reopened the debate over the school when it decided to seek proposals from the private sector to clean up and finish the campus or to buy it outright.

Cooley called the Belmont saga an embarrassment.

“We’re talking about all sorts of people making all kinds of money, maybe legitimately, maybe not,” he said. “We want to find out what went wrong from a sense of governmental operations or otherwise.”

Cooley has included Mullinax in the new task force, which features five prosecutors and environmental crimes investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department.

In addition to its probe of environmental lapses, the group is looking into allegations that Belmont contractors overbilled the school district.

Cooley said he wants his task force to complete its review within four months.