EDITORIAL BURYING BELMONT.

YOU'VE got to give Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Roy Romer some credit.

He's willing to 'fess up to his mistakes and change his mind in the face of his beloved Belmont Learning Center's bursting bubble.

In announcing Thursday that the nation's costliest school will never be completed as planned, Romer said, ``This is a sad day for me because I had a lot at stake in trying to build Belmont.'' But, he added, it would be ``wrong to build this school,'' given that it straddles a major earthquake fault.

It takes a big man to admit he was wrong. That puts the head of the nation's second largest school district in rarefied company among Los Angeles leaders who routinely lie, spin and doubletalk their way out of taking any responsibility for the sorry state of affairs they've caused.

And Belmont is about as sorry a fiasco as Los Angeles has ever seen.

LAUSD officials admit to wasting $166 million on Belmont, money that was supposed to be used to educate children. They spent the funds on property near downtown that nobody else wanted, without regard to the likelihood that oil and gas fields and earthquake faults lay beneath the surface, as is the case in much of the Los Angeles Basin.

They ignored environmental and safety laws, engaged in a long pattern of deceit and offered no defense other than their own incompetence.

Belmont began long before Romer came to the LAUSD 2 1/2 years ago, but he quickly made it his own. He scoffed at critics. He mocked safety concerns. He steamrolled the school board into reviving the project it had rightfully abandoned - all without a clue as to what he was doing.

All he had was the word of downtown big shots like billionaire Eli Broad, who had his eye on Belmont as yet another monument to his vision of what Los Angeles should be.

And Broad's word carries a lot of weight in Los Angeles these days.

With help from some wealthy pals, Broad bankrolled the election of most school board members and many city politicians. He has become the de facto king of Los Angeles, the behind-the-scenes mastermind of City Hall and the LAUSD, the man who knows better than anyone else what's good for the ordinary folk.

Broad used his clout to get Romer appointed superintendent, and had no trouble cutting a deal with Romer to have the taxpayers spend $100 million or more to finish building Belmont so it could be turned over to the billionaire to operate as he saw fit as a charter school.

Well, it turns out Broad and Romer and the big-shot downtown lawyers from O'Melveny & Myers - who put the Belmont deal together in the first place and orchestrated the campaign to resurrect it - were wrong.

Belmont can't be finished without putting the lives of thousands of children at risk. Together, the dangers of a quake and exploding gases have made clear the need to bury the project and drive a stake through its heart once and for all.

All that's left is recovering the $6 million LAUSD officials spent resurrecting the project to become Broad's private academy. And that ought to be easy: Broad hired Romer. He vouched for Belmont's safety. His ego stood to benefit from its completion.

He ought to pay the $6 million.