2 SCANDALS DOMINATE THE HEADLINES.

Byline: David R. Baker Staff Writer

The last year of the millennium in Los Angeles is a story of twin scandals, one that rocked the Los Angeles police Department and the other that is changing the face of city's educational system.

In exchange for a more lenient sentence, a former officer charged with stealing cocaine told tales of police shooting unarmed people, planting evidence, and beating suspects.

And Los Angeles Unified's efforts to build a high school atop an oil field seeping explosive methane exposed school district bureaucrats indifferent to student safety and unwilling to take responsibility for their work.

As the Daily News looked back at 1999, the twin scandals overshadowed 10 other major stories as the top news of the year because of their broad impact on the community as a whole and their implications about how the city at all levels have been governed over a long period of time.

Both scandals raised questions about the oversight of key public agencies the LAPD and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

``In both instances, you had people looking the other way while these problems grew,'' said Erwin Chemerinsky, a legal scholar at the University of Southern California who headed the effort to reform the city charter.

As the year drew to a close, both scandals held the promise of forcing major reforms at both institutions.

That process has already begun at LAUSD, where problems surrounding the half-built Belmont Learning Center led to the ouster of several top district officials by a slate of reform candidates heavily backed by Mayor Richard Riordan.

``(Belmont) definitely was a catalyst because it was symbolic of everything that was wrong with how the district was managed,'' said Caprice Young, one of the new board members.

At the LAPD, results of a sweeping Board of Inquiry investigation into alleged corruption at the department's Rampart Division, and the entire force, will be presented to the Police Commission in January, along with recommendations for reform.

``This has really hit people,'' said Commissioner Dean Hansell. ``Every officer feels this one, the pain of it.''

Both scandals had been brewing for years.

Critics long had attacked the plans to build Belmont at the corner of Temple Street and Beaudry Avenue downtown. They pointed to conflicts of interest in the project the law firm representing the district also worked for the lead developer as well as wisdom of building over an old oil field laced with methane and toxins without taking adequate precautions.

Then in September, the school district's chief investigator Don Mullinax released an exhaustive, damning report on the project. And Belmont quickly claimed victims.

Mullinax slammed nine current LAUSD officials, including Superintendent Ruben Zacarias, for failing to properly supervise Belmont. All of those in question have since been placed on leave or have had their contracts bought out.

Their actions, he said, were part of a corrupt culture at the 711,000-student district.

``This culture developed a practice of denying responsibility, deflecting (rather than responding to) criticism, and defending poorly planned and executed LAUSD actions with regard to Belmont,'' Mullinax wrote in his report.

On Mullinax's advice, school board members voted to sue the powerful law firm that had advised them on Belmont. And when similar environmental problems arose at another school construction site, the board majority shook up the district's management team, first hiring a new chief operating officer, then ousting Zacarias.

The new management set in motion more sweeping changes. Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller brought in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to oversee construction of as many as 150 new schools. Reacting to a second Mullinax report on financial misdeeds at Belmont, Miller and incoming interim Superintendent Ramon Cortines hired a new financial czar for the district and formed a committee to revamp the way LAUSD handles money.

By year's end, the changes had stirred up criticism, with some of Zacarias' supporters now calling for breaking up the district. And Belmont's fate remained in the air, the school board still unsure what to do with the $170 million project that could cost $100 million more to complete.

In contrast, problems in the LAPD's Rampart Division remained out of the public eye until this year.

In September, former Officer Rafael Antonio Perez pleaded guilty to stealing six pounds of cocaine worth about $800,000 from an evidence storage area at the LAPD's Parker Center headquarters.

As part of his plea agreement, Perez gave prosecutors evidence of corruption among other officers. He admitted that he and his partner shot an unarmed man, Javier Ovando, planted a gun on him and testified in court that he tried to kill them.

Eleven officers were placed on leave, and one officer was fired, while the department launched an investigation. The federal government opened its own probe.

Ovando was released from prison, although he remained paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the attack.

The allegations echoed complaints made by Los Angeles' minority communities for years. And it erased much of LAPD's success in restoring its image after the Rodney King beating.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo: (1 -- color) Children from the North Valley Jewish Community Center are led to safety by LAPD officers following the tragic shootings there.

Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer

(2 -- color) Problems surrounding the incomplete Belmont Learning Center resulted in nine current LAUSD officials being placed on leave or having their contracts bought out.