BELMONT'S FATAL FAULT EARTHQUAKE THREAT SHAKES ROMER'S SUPPORT OF COSTLY HIGH SCHOOL.

Byline: Helen Gao Staff Writer

After Los Angeles Unified spent 14 years and $166 million, schools Superintendent Roy Romer announced Wednesday that he is ending his crusade to complete the troubled Belmont Learning Center as planned because of an earthquake fault underlying the downtown site.

Romer, who convinced the school board in March to revive the project after it voted to abandon it in 2000, said at a press conference that the decision was difficult for him, but unavoidable because of the risk to children and staff members.

Still, he left open the possibility that a scaled-down campus could be built on a safe corner of the site or that some existing buildings could be reinforced. Both options would add tens of millions more to what is already dubbed the nation's costliest school project.

Recruited to the office in July 2000 by billionaire Eli Broad, another leading advocate for completing Belmont, the superintendent recalled promising himself to get the project done the very first week in his new job.

``This is a very sad day for me because I had a lot at stake in trying to build Belmont,'' Romer said. ``I was very disappointed when I found that these circumstances prevented us from building it as anticipated.

``But it's imperative to change our mind when the facts make you change it. It's wrong to build this school and occupy it with students straddling a fault of this character.''

Whether the school board once again will vote to abandon Belmont or agree to spend more to salvage it remained an open question.

School board President Caprice Young, who previously supported the completion of Belmont, joined longtime opponents David Tokofsky and Julie Korenstein on Wednesday in calling for abandoning the project.

The remaining four board members left open the possibility they will support yet another try to resurrect Belmont, with Jose Huizar strongly in favor of building a smaller school on the site.

``We need to sell the property,'' said Young. ``The truth is we did everything we could have done to find out whether it could be made safe, or built within financially reasonably constraints, and we can't.

``Let's accept it and move on.''

Tokofsky said it's foolish for the district to sink more money into Belmont at a time when the state government is poised to make further budget cuts. Funding for Belmont is being raised through certificates of participation - debt financing that must be paid off with precious general fund money.

He called the insistence to continue with Belmont ``hubris, tragedy and farce all rolled into one.''

The earthquake fault found on the 35-acre Belmont property extends parallel with Beaudry Avenue and lies directly underneath a haluilt administration and school building, which are configured in an L shape with four other structures.

The fault, according to California Institute of Technology professor Kerry Sieh, is capable of generating a 6.2 to 6.7 magnitude earthquake, dislocating buildings by 4 to 12 inches. The fault is more than 45 feet wide in some stretches.

Whether it's active is unclear because Sieh was unable to find topsoil that has been undisturbed in the last 11,000 years to conduct his analysis.

A state law called the Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act defines an active fault as one that has experienced disturbance in the past 11,000 years.

Erring on the side of caution, school officials are assuming that the fault underneath Belmont is active.

State law prohibits any school buildings to be constructed directly atop an active fault and requires a 50-feet buffer zone on either side of one.

While the two buildings atop the fault would have to be razed, Romer said one option would be to retrofit the remaining four buildings to make them earthquake-safe at a cost of about $70 million.

Another option is to build a smaller high school from scratch on a 12-acre portion of the Belmont site that, according to Sieh, sits on bedrocks and is free of earthquake faults. Depending on the size of the school, the cost could run up to $60 million for 2,000 seats.

Huizar and Romer said building on the 12-acre area needs to be considered because open space is hard to come by in the densely populated downtown region, and some parents continue to support a school to be built on the site.

``The odds are we will have to use what we have,'' said Romer, although he also stressed looking for new locations.

Before discovering an earthquake fault underneath Belmont, officials were struggling to design a remediation system to deal with toxic hydrogen sulfide and explosive methane gas found on the site.

Hamid Saebfar with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control said a new school project on the Belmont site would require the district to design a new mitigation system that takes into account an active fault and gas migration as a result of it.

Saebfar's agency had told the district to complete a seismic study as early as 1999, but the study was put off while the board waffled on whether to continue with the project.

Belmont was built on an abandoned oil field without thorough study of the site and without a remediation system to deal with the gases under the tenure of former Superintendent Ruben Zacarias.

School board member Julie Korenstein, who has been on the board for 16 years, said it baffles her that despite the star-crossed history of Belmont, there are still voices out there supporting its reinvention. ``What more can go wrong with a property?'' she asked. ``How many messages can we be given (that) this is not a place to build a school?

``How much more fire can you play with? Methane, hydrogen sulfide and now an earthquake fault. How much more can you take?''

Staff Writer Beth Barrett contributed to this story.

CAPTION(S):

photo, box, map

Photo:

The Belmont Learning Center as it appeared in late 1999.

Box:

no caption (Chronology)

SOURCE: Daily News research

Map:

Active fault line verified