BELMONT HAZARD STUDY MIGHT NOT BE COMPLETED UNTIL AFTER DEADLINE.

Byline: Greg Gittrich Staff Writer

Drawing attention to a crucial flaw with the deadline imposed on an independent review of the Belmont Learning Center, California environmental experts told the Belmont Commission on Monday that the state's evaluation of hazards at the campus won't be complete until November - six weeks after the commission is scheduled to deliver its recommendation to the school district.

Bob Borzelleri, chief deputy director of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, said the agency anticipates completing an evaluation of environmental tests from the site by late September. That data will be used to complete a remedial investigation and human health risk report by mid-November, Borzelleri said.

The Belmont Commission, working on a 60-day deadline imposed by the school board, is scheduled to issue its recommendation to the Los Angeles Unified School District regarding the fate of the nation's costliest high school by Oct. 20.

Presumably, the commission could tell the board that it's safe and cost-effective to continue building the half-completed $200 million school, only to have that recommendation struck down later by the Department of Toxic Substances Control.

While state officials already are working at a hurried pace, the department's time frame seemed to take several commissioners by surprise, and didn't sit well with former District Attorney Ira Reiner, executive director and general counsel of the commission.

Reiner told Borzelleri and his colleague Hamid Saebfar, chief of Southern California Clean-up Operations, that the commission plans to spend the final two weeks of its review deliberating and drafting its recommendation.

``It is critical to this commission that it have the input of your agency before those deliberations begin,'' Reiner said.

``We're going to be calling you the first week of October to tell us what you got and if it's half a story then we're going to have to proceed on . . . half a story,'' Reiner said.

Following the meeting, Saebfar, who has been overseeing the state's review of Belmont, said the toxic substances control department will work tenaciously to move up its deadline, or at least issue a draft report to the commission. However, he cautioned, the state's work relies largely upon environmental data being gathered by a district consultant, Environmental Strategies Corp.

The consultant had planned to finish the latest round of testing and issue a report by mid-October, needing the time, in part, to understand the trend of contamination at the site.

Since the potentially explosive methane and hydrogen sulfide gasses plaguing Belmont come from a natural oil formation, the level of contamination can fluctuate. According to officials, the best way to understand the contamination trends is to take soil, vapor and groundwater samples over a substantial period of time.

When pushed by the commission last week, Environmental Strategies Corp. officials said they would attempt to move their work up by a few weeks. But Saebfar said even those few weeks wouldn't give his agency enough time to crank out a final report before the commission goes into its deliberations.

``We may have to get the data up front and do some of the work ourselves or it will be very difficult for us to make a full presentation to the commission by then (the first week of October),'' Saebfar said.