EDITORIAL CURSED LAND BELMONT REVIVAL IS A PIPE DREAM THAT COULD TURN INTO ROMER'S FOLLY.

CONSTRUCTION at the toxic and unstable land where the twice-aborted Belmont Learning School sits is about to begin again after years. And while some at the LAUSD are hailing the scaled-down project as the plan that will salvage the $300 million failure, it's tough to imagine anything good coming out of that cursed land.

Still, Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Roy Romer is determined to sink millions more into Belmont - money that should be going into classrooms and teachers - as some sort of personal test of endurance. Romer can't seem to let Belmont go even though he's already assured himself a legacy as America's master builder of schools.

The strikes against Belmont are many. Even as just a half-built facility serving only errant trees and transients, Belmont is the nation's most expensive school. School officials abandoned it years ago because the evidence showed that the old oil field with hundreds of abandoned wells posed unpredictable long-term dangers. That risk was heightened by the fact that the site sits directly atop an earthquake fault, a revelation that forced destruction of two buildings while others still stand or will be built just a few feet outside the 50-foot safe zone above the fault line.

This new Belmont is a scaled-down campus of six ``learning communities'' that will handle only half the 5,000 students originally planned. Much of the rest of the land will be used to build a park that will need to be policed 24/7 to keep out the large nearby population of homeless campers and gang members.

Before LAUSD officials accept the bids for the reconstruction project, they ought to ask themselves the following question: Why would parents choose to send their children to this educational Frankenstein when they can pick from one of three new nearby schools that would never be compared with Love Canal, the toxic town on the East Coast?

Wouldn't parents prefer, for example, the futuristic and attractive high school that is under construction just a few blocks away and slated for a 2008 opening? The irony is that Belmont was built so kids would no longer have to be bused out of the community, but it could end up needing kids to be bused in to fill the seats.

No one wants to waste $300 million. But as painful as it is, sometimes the right choice is to walk away from a bad project, particularly one as cursed as Belmont.