Top L.A. Unified Attorney Is Fired

The Los Angeles Unified School District will not renew the $228,000-a-year contract of its top attorney, Harold J. Kwalwasser, who has been general counsel since November 2000 and handled such sensitive topics as special education integration and the construction problems at the Belmont Learning Center.

Several district officials said that Kwalwasser’s hard-charging personality had rubbed some school board members the wrong way and that some trustees had questioned whether his office was spending too much money on outside legal advice.

District Supt. Roy Romer said he decided not to renew the contract of the man he had recruited from the Pentagon after concluding that Kwalwasser was not a good fit for the district in the long term. Romer said he wanted someone who might remain another 10 years in the post.

“Hal is a competent lawyer, but there are other characteristics to be effective in this job that I thought could be improved, and that’s why I made the decision,” Romer said. “This had to do with a composite of the cost of running the operation [and] the confidence of the clientele.”

Board member Jose Huizar called Kwalwasser “a very intelligent attorney,” but said he and other trustees were not satisfied with the way Kwalwasser managed his office and its contracts.

As part of his severance, Kwalwasser will receive up to 18 months of salary for a total of $342,000 if he doesn’t find a new job in that time, said district spokeswoman Stephanie Brady. She added that the district is “quite confident” that Kwalwasser will land another position soon. Future contracts, she said, won’t include such provisions.

Kwalwasser said Monday that he was notified last week that he would not be rehired, but said he was not given an explanation. He will work for the district until the end of June.

“Roy knows why he did it; I really don’t know,” he said. “I’m looking forward to doing something else.”

Kwalwasser was a campaign consultant to Romer in 1994, when the then-Colorado governor won his third term. Kwalwasser left his post as deputy counsel for the Defense Department to reorganize the district’s legal office, which was in turmoil over the decision to build the Belmont Learning Center on a former oil field downtown. He negotiated the legal aftershocks of Belmont with mixed results.

Kwalwasser beefed up the district’s legal department and led it aggressively, refusing to settle cases he considered meritless. His latest victory came in May, when the district approved a compromise, negotiated under a federal mediator, that gives the district more latitude in how it integrates 33,000 disabled students into regular classrooms.

John Perez, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, said the union always had problems with Kwalwasser “because he kept continually asking for more and more lawyers, and more and more money.”

Board member David Tokofsky praised Kwalwasser’s work but said his severance package sends a bad message during a budget crisis.

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Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.