ANOTHER BOND? LAUSD HASN'T EARNED SUPPORT.

Byline: Bryan Steele

THE Los Angeles Unified School District hopes voters will approve a $3.35 billion school construction bond this November.

Voter acceptance hinges on whether the LAUSD is perceived to have changed its ways of neglect and waste.

When the district recently announced it made a state-funding deadline for the first time in memory, there was cause for hope. But when recent aspects of the district's most notorious project, the Belmont Learning Center, are scrutinized, a troubling picture emerges.

The California Environmental Quality Act governs public agencies building in California. The cornerstone of this law is a document detailing all aspects of the project called the environmental impact report. The purpose of this report is to ensure an open process that fosters public involvement from project inception to completion.

When Belmont's first EIR was finalized, there was only passing reference to the environmental hazards that stopped the project years later.

Even though many of the site's problems were known at the time, construction began a short time later without incorporating any safety measures. Today, testing continues to provide more precise information about the site's hazards. Due to this ongoing testing, plans for the site's safety system are still under design.

Because of these significant and ongoing changes, CEQA requires a subsequent EIR to be prepared.

Reminiscent of the old days when the LAUSD tried to completely skirt Belmont's EIR process by claiming environmental hazards were insignificant, the LAUSD is now claiming it need only revise the original EIR because new information and related remedies are, again, insignificant. Plus, based on the provided timetable, there will not be adequate opportunity for meaningful public involvement prior to the project's final authorization and resumption of construction.

Why would the LAUSD treat Belmont's CEQA requirements so casually considering its bellwether status?

The answer goes beyond the obvious issues of additional time and money; producing a new EIR would also require the district to clearly state the conditions at the site and exactly how it planned to fix those problems.

Further, the district would have to open these plans to a meaningful period of public comment.

A new EIR would put all this information into a format so that anyone with expertise could judge the process with relative ease. By opening the process in this way, district officials and contractors would expose the project to unsolicited public scrutiny that could result in delay and possible legal challenges. This is exactly the kind of public involvement CEQA is designed to offer.

One example of unsolicited comment comes from the former Los Angeles president of the American Society of Civil Engineers and current professor and director of the University of Southern California's Construction and Management Program, Henry Koffman.

In a letter dated March 14, 2002, to LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer, Koffman offers his support for completing Belmont; but of the proposed safety design, he asserts, ``It is simply not a good engineering solution for this particular site. If used, many serious problems will occur.''

Koffman urged the LAUSD to accept his offer to help, but Romer never responded.

Compounding Romer's apparent rebuff is the unwillingness of the school board to hear a resolution presented by Friends of the Children, a Los Angeles-based education advocacy group. While this resolution calls for a subsequent EIR, all advocates are asking is for the issue to be publicly debated by the board, but apparently to no avail.

Further, based on the LAUSD's time-line, the opportunity for public comment as required by CEQA appears nonexistent.

By the time the currently proposed EIR revision is made public, the entire plan to make Belmont safe will already be finalized.

This is not how the process is supposed to work. Public involvement is supposed to run concurrently with project development. But in Belmont's current form, there will not be opportunity for meaningful public involvement until after the plan is completed, and then that involvement will be superfluous as the district and contractor are scheduled to resume construction a short time later.

The LAUSD's treatment of the CEQA process today is precisely the same kind of behavior that got it into so much trouble in the past.

Before voters accept another multibillion-dollar school construction bond, we need unquestionable assurance that the money will be spent wisely, in accordance with the law and result in a safe product. Based on the LAUSD's action to date, such assurances appear absent.

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- color) Pictured above and below are different angles of the unfinished Belmont Learning Center. Construction of the school was halted after toxic chemicals were discovered on the site. Its future will be determined by voters in November if they approve a $3.35 billion bond.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer