School Board Poised to Revive Abandoned Belmont Project

One of the first things Roy Romer did after he became superintendent of the Los Angeles schools nearly two years ago was walk around the shuttered Belmont Learning Complex.

The half-finished high school next to downtown loomed over the Harbor Freeway like a gigantic billboard advertising the Los Angeles Unified School District’s incompetence in starting such a huge project on a polluted site and then stopping it after spending $154 million.

The Board of Education had killed the project before Romer’s arrival amid fears about the health hazards of toxic gases beneath the former oil field and allegations of mismanagement.

But as Romer paced through the waist-high weeds and empty halls, he envisioned the day when Belmont would be resurrected.

And that day appears to be at hand Tuesday, when a majority of the board seems likely to approve a plan by a group of Latino activists and school builders to finish the campus--a proposal that could cost another $87 million.

That turnaround, observers say, is a result of Romer’s political skills, the election of several new school board members, rising Latino power, the faded fortunes of the project’s critics in Sacramento and a second look at the environmental solutions.

“Building Belmont will save LAUSD,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “It will lead to more schools being built, to the school district not being broken up. It’s that important.”

Romer needs four votes on the seven-member Board of Education to finish the school, which would serve 4,600 students in one of the district’s most crowded corridors.

Board President Caprice Young and members Jose Huizar and Mike Lansing said they will vote to enter negotiations with the Alliance for a Better Community to complete Belmont. Marlene Canter and David Tokofsky said they are leaning in the same direction. But Julie Korenstein and Genethia Hudley Hayes oppose the plan, saying they are still concerned about environmental hazards.

“You need to give Romer credit for finding a way to take a politically toxic issue and bringing it to what looks like a good conclusion,” said Bill Ouchi, a UCLA business professor involved in local school reform.

To its supporters, finishing Belmont is about more than providing new classrooms and getting downtown students off buses. The district’s very credibility is on the line.

For these proponents, Belmont is about keeping a promise of a new school to mainly Latino families who felt betrayed after the district abandoned the campus in January 2000, midway through construction and, in addition to the $154 million in building costs, spent $20 million more on attorneys, litigation and other expenses.

Belmont has become a rallying point for a broad cross-section of Latino power brokers and its completion a litmus test of their growing influence in civic life.

For the district, the school is about regaining the confidence of Sacramento lawmakers, who hold the district’s purse strings, and ending a national embarrassment. And, observers say, it’s also about reclaiming public trust as L.A. Unified prepares to ask Los Angeles voters to approve more than $1 billion in new school construction bonds in November.

“To complete it now would signal that this is a new school board, a new superintendent and a new democratic process in which what the community wants is what the community gets,” said Robert Garcia, a civil rights attorney who heads a citizens committee overseeing the district’s previous $2.4-billion school construction and repair bond.

Belmont seemed doomed when Romer arrived. The school had become entangled in lawsuits and investigations.

The district’s inspector general criticized its staff for starting construction without adequate environmental review. The district last year lost an arbitrated judgment in a contract dispute over $17 million owed the previous developer, architects and others.

The district even took its own outside lawyers to court for allegedly not protecting its interests on Belmont, but in January lost that malpractice suit. The district attorney’s office, meanwhile, is conducting a probe into, among other things, whether the pollution’s extent was properly studied before construction.

During his first days on the job, Romer decided that Belmont would be key to rehabilitating the image of a school system that, he says, “couldn’t shoot straight.”

It irked him to see the abandoned campus, boarded up and wrapped in plastic sheathing.

Romer still winces when recalling a meeting at a banker’s high-rise office that overlooked the property. “We went to the window and he said, ‘There’s your school,’ ” Romer recalled. So the former Colorado governor began a determined campaign to finish it.

Romer lobbied reluctant school board members, some newly elected, to seek bids from outside developers. When board members hedged, Romer agreed to a compromise, adding an option to sell the 34-acre site.

But Romer acknowledges that he viewed the compromise as more a political necessity than a realistic goal. “I wanted to build [the school],” he said. “I just [didn’t] see selling it as a good option.”

The board voted 4 to 3 in December 2000 to seek outside bids, and Romer began pitching Belmont to anyone who would listen. He buttonholed reluctant construction executives at cocktail parties. He kept hawking the notorious project despite Belmont’s bad press.

Several construction teams later came to a bidders conference at the district’s downtown headquarters. Romer took the microphone and made an emotional plea to a room of skeptical executives.

“He sort of implored the private sector to come forward to help the district,” said Charles Robinson, a vice president at Levine-Frickie, an environmental engineering firm that was one of the unsuccessful bidders. “He made me feel, ‘Here’s a guy we need to work with because they’re desperate.’ ”

Three teams ultimately submitted bids to complete Belmont. To help legitimize the process, Romer hired an outside panel of construction, engineering and insurance experts to evaluate the competing proposals. In a boost for Romer, the committee concluded that the school could be made safe and should be built.

Toward the end of the bidding process, Romer disqualified one bidder, Eastridge Cos., after concluding that the firm had access to inside information on Belmont. Romer said he wanted to contain the controversy before it tainted the selection process.

The company has since been cleared, but Romer said another undisclosed problem kept it out of the running. He would not elaborate.

The expert panel recommended the Alliance for a Better Community, a coalition of leading Latino activists and business executives. The alliance includes the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

“Our mission is not to make money on this project,” said Ed Avila, president of the nonprofit ABC group and former head of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency. “We really aren’t in the development business, we are in the school construction advocacy business. We have to get those seats.”

The ABC group wants to run Belmont as a charter school. But, in what could have been another obstacle to the completion project, the teachers union raised questions about the effectiveness of the proposed charter operator, Edison Schools.

In the last week, at Romer’s urging, any discussion about whether it should be a charter school or regular campus has been put on hold indefinitely.

Avila’s advocacy group sought out construction and engineering companies when many firms were reluctant to sign on to the scandal-plagued project. The alliance formed a team that included as its general contractor the large Southland firm Matt Construction, which had built the Crystal Cathedral, Bonaventure Hotel and several schools.

“We knew that this would be a unique kind of deal--in my entire experience I have never seen anything like what we did,” Avila said. “But we just wanted to make sure that there would be at least one first-class bid and no one could say that there weren’t any capable companies to complete the school.”

Romer said ABC was the most qualified bidder, noting that Matt Construction has a proven track record of building schools. But critics have questioned whether the ABC team had a leg up from the beginning because of its strong ties to the Latino community and its relationship with billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, a confidant of Romer.

The other eligible bidder, Komex H20 of Westminster, has alleged that the ABC group has an inferior environmental plan and was chosen for political reasons.

ABC officials drummed up support by holding meetings with parents at public schools in the downtown area. And Broad provided $16,000 in seed money for the group. Perhaps more important, Broad lent moral support and advice.

“I told them you have to prove that the property can be remediated and monitored, and you have to indemnify the district against liability,” Broad said.

Broad sits on the board of directors of a giant insurance company, AIG International, which was the major insurer on all three bids.

Some school board members still have concerns about soaring costs. Finishing the job will cost as much as $87 million and be funded by bonds or fees from private construction projects throughout the district’s territory. Board members also worry about liability and hazards from methane and hydrogen sulfide gases beneath the school.

The ABC group would install a piping system throughout the site to vent and treat the gases. A sheer polyethylene liner also would be installed underground to serve as a barrier.

“I think there are still serious environmental problems with the site,” said school board member Hayes. “There are too many open questions to say I’m comfortable.”

Unlike two years ago, Belmont faces virtually no outside opposition. The project’s two chief critics in Sacramento--former Assemblyman Scott Wildman and former state Sen. Tom Hayden--have left office because of term limits. Hayden declined to comment about Tuesday’s school board vote; Wildman did not return calls.

Many other public officials are eagerly showing support. The Los Angeles City Council last week voted unanimously to endorse the revival plan going before the school board. The Proposition BB Citizens Oversight Committee also has recommended that Belmont be finished.

Romer sees Tuesday’s vote as the culmination of a “political marathon.” But even if the school board rejects the ABC plan, Romer said he will return until he breaks the finish line. “I’ll go back on the next Tuesday,” he said.