District Disqualifies Belmont Bidder

One of three developers competing to complete the Los Angeles Unified School District’s $200-million Belmont Learning Complex was disqualified Wednesday after a district review determined that a company employee had access to inside information.

Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer announced the decision during an interview about the internal review that found that a real estate consultant on other district projects, Jeff Baize of the Eastridge Cos., worked on that firm’s bid for the Belmont project.

Romer’s decision comes only days before he was scheduled to recommend one of the three bidders to the Board of Education to take on the complicated task of mitigating environmental problems at the incomplete high school and then finish construction.

The contract will be worth tens of millions of dollars to make the school, which is located on part of a defunct oil field near downtown, safe for 5,000 students.

“I am not sending forward the bid” from Eastridge, Romer said Wednesday. He said the rejection of Eastridge’s proposal stemmed from deficiencies in its plan and “a potential conflict of interest or perceived conflict of interest.”

Eastridge principal Susan Eastridge said she was stunned by the district’s decision and denied the report’s allegations that her firm had an unfair advantage.

She said that she previously had told district officials about Baize’s activities on the Belmont bid proposal and had been assured that Eastridge would remain eligible.

She said that district officials told her that “each and every bidder [for the Belmont project] has potential conflicts of interest” and that Eastridge was no more culpable than the others.

The report criticized the district for lacking written conflict-of-interest policies, something Romer conceded may need “tightening up.”

The report issued on Jan. 30 by the district’s office of inspector general focuses on Baize’s activities since he was retained in June to help identify possible school sites in the San Fernando Valley. About 20 other Eastridge property consultants also aided the district’s real estate division.

In August, Scot Graham, then director of the district’s real estate division, learned that Eastridge was preparing to compete for the Belmont project.

Graham was concerned that Baize would have access to proprietary information and initiated an investigation.

Baize was taken off the real estate search contract, officials said.

District investigators found e-mail, letters and other documents in Baize’s district office regarding the Belmont project and the value of its land, according to the report.

In an interview, Baize said he did not have access to proprietary information and that papers investigators found were public records.

He said he did not begin working in earnest on the Belmont project until after he left the district contract.

When asked about a computer file investigators that found with Belmont in its title, Baize said: “Many people on that floor had access to that file. You know, I don’t know what file was on that computer, I didn’t have exclusive use to it.”

Baize was singled out, according to the report, because his co-workers had told Graham that he had shown “an inordinate amount of interest” in Belmont and because Baize had experience with such complex projects.

Romer said he decided over the past two days to act to avoid tainting the selection process.

He said Eastridge’s disqualification did not hinder the project substantially.

“We have two very good bids,” he said, referring to the remaining developers, Alliance for a Better Community and Komex.

Board President Caprice Young said the investigation showed that the school system has learned the importance of “due diligence” after Belmont’s history of litigation.

Work was halted on the campus in December 2000.

Eastridge executives said that they spent as much as $500,000 on their proposal and that they plan to call for a full district investigation into the grounds for their rejection.