This district squanders your cash

LOS ANGELES schools Supt. Roy Romer recently told a group of San Fernando Valley business leaders that the district’s huge construction program would be impossible if not for L.A. Unified’s monstrous size.

I’m sorry I wasn’t there. That punch line must have ripped through the crowd, whose members know well that the district’s size makes it slow and unresponsive. Yet the district is asking voters to approve the fourth bond issue since 1997 to pay for projects promised to be completed in the first and each subsequent bond.

Consider a few facts:

It costs the LAUSD nearly three times what the state Department of Education estimates as the average cost of building a school -- and double what it costs similar urban districts.

Officials claim it is unfair to compare the LAUSD with other districts -- the cost of buying land and cleaning it up add dramatically to completion costs. They also blame steep spikes in the cost of construction materials and labor because of the region’s building boom.

But the “nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” excuse doesn’t hold up because other large urban districts face similar pressures.

In real estate, time is money, and nobody wastes time like the LAUSD. It can take years to negotiate with a landowner, have the negotiations fail and then move to condemnation. Meanwhile, the value of the land goes up, and the district piles up legal bills and adds relocation costs.

Other urban districts meet the challenge in much less time for much less money.

The Long Beach Unified School District is one of the largest in the state. In 2003, it partnered with the city of Long Beach to share parkland and build the two-story Cesar Chavez Elementary School on 2 1/2 acres. The cost was $15 million.

Compare that with the experience of New Economics for Women, a local nonprofit developer that decided to build an elementary school about the size of Chavez as part of a housing project in Canoga Park. The developer estimated that the 536-seat charter school would cost about $11 million. (It secured the land for next to nothing, putting its cost estimates in line with Long Beach’s.)

Enter the LAUSD, which hates competition. First, it contemplated condemning the school site. Then it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees trying to kill the project. Failing that, the district took over and slowed the project to a near standstill, driving the cost up to $23 million.

Other examples:

* The district parking garage, located across the street from LAUSD headquarters, was a mere $37 million 18 months ago. Last week, the school board OK’d an increase in the project’s cost, to $52 million, almost entirely because of rising real estate costs and delays in acquiring property.

* Sweetwater Union High School District, the largest secondary-school district in the state, recently completed the first phase of its building program under budget and 11 years ahead of schedule. Cost per square foot: about half that of LAUSD.

After widespread waste and mismanagement associated with the first bond issue, Measure BB, L.A. Unified brought in a team of retired Navy bureaucrats in 2001 to manage its construction program. Within six months, they were $140 million over budget. Since then, the “military-education” complex has installed a Pentagon-sized construction and procurement program that rivals the one that produced $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers.

So it’s no surprise that each of the district’s bonds has included hundreds of millions of dollars to finish projects promised in previous bonds. Land costs are higher here, but the district’s slow-footed officials, bond money in hand, make matters worse.

Contractors leery of dealing with the district drive costs higher by building contingencies into their budgets. Worst of all, there are no incentives for district employees or contractors to deliver projects ahead of schedule or under budget. The longer the district takes to make a decision the better -- because everyone gets paid while they wait.

All this might just be another huge public works project predictably over budget and behind schedule. But with the LAUSD, every day the district falls further behind is another day our children are trapped in shameful and crowded conditions.

Angelenos can no longer ignore the correlation between crowded, dilapidated schools and the district’s staggering dropout rates. This emergency must be met with the outrage and urgency it once commanded, especially when, with each successive bond, the district delays reaching the goal it promised to win approval of earlier measures -- the day when year-round calendars end and all children will be off school buses.

Conservatives and taxpayer groups have come unglued over the district’s latest bond issue. Liberals, progressives and those who place public education and the welfare of our children above all else should do the same. Until now, we have held our tongues (and noses) and supported every bond out of fear that our opposition would deprive the schoolchildren we are trying to help.

This has to change for two reasons:

First, as Proposition 13 taught us, long-term government mismanagement leads to voter revolt -- and that would be devastating to our schoolchildren.

Second, our schools are in an unparalleled crisis. We cannot wait for a district building program that will ease conditions in, say, 2012. We lose thousands of children every year waiting for critical improvements due and paid for long ago.

As the succession of broken-promise bond measures has shown, the district pays heed to the public only in the weeks leading up to bond elections. We’re in that period now. Voters must slam fists on tables and demand accountability, aggressive oversight and accelerated timetables for projects.

Once the votes are counted and the money is banked, it will be too late.