EDITORIAL OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY THE HIGH COST OF THE LAUSD'S CONSULTANT ADDICTION.

FOR the Los Angeles Unified School District, which managed to blow more than $175 million on the Belmont Learning Center and shortchange the public out of $600 million in Proposition BB bond funds, $71 million might not sound like a lot of money.

That's probably why district officials thought nothing of spending that much on consultants for its crash program to build or expand 150 schools, up to twice as much as it would have cost simply to hire on additional staffers.

At the LAUSD, every dollar is ``other people's money.'' An extra $10 million wasted here or there is no big deal.

But in time, tens of millions of dollars frittered away become billions of dollars, just as $50 a year for a bond issue adds up to real money for the average home owner after 10 bond issues.

Those misspent funds become schools never built, teachers never hired, textbooks never replaced.

The LAUSD's $71 million consultant-spending spree is the perfect case in point.

With money no object, the district outsourced much of the $2.5 billion its facilities division spent last year, paying some 663 consultants in the process.

These weren't all high-priced ``experts'' who, in theory, bring special talents and skills to the table. Instead, the district hired outside clerks, data-entry personnel and secretaries paid an astonishing $60 an hour.

Funds for the army of consultants all came out of the district's school-construction bonds, even though state law requires that bond money pay for actual projects, not administrative overhead. But state law contains a loophole for consultants working on a specific project, a loophole LAUSD officials were all too happy to exploit.

So while voters were promised only new and refurbished schools for their bond money, they're also getting hundreds of overpriced private-sector bureaucrats, the cost of which inevitably detracts from the money that can be invested in projects directly benefiting students.

Had the LAUSD simply decided to put the same number of new staffers on its full-time pay roll, it might have saved $35 million for students and taxpayers alike.

Of course, hiring new public-sector employees has its disadvantages, most notably burdensome civil-service laws and union contracts that protect incompetence. As the LAUSD facilities chief executive, Jim McConnell, remarked: ``It is wrong-headed to think we can build a huge LAUSD bureaucracy to manage this problem. I don't think we should.''

He has a point, because the district needs to build schools as quickly as possible. But would the district really need to build a bureaucracy from scratch? After all, there are already 1,616 employees working in the facilities division.

Are they not up to doing a good job?

If Belmont is any indication, no.

But if that's the case - if the district's own facilities experts, clerks and secretaries truly aren't capable of doing their jobs - why are they still on the payroll?

And what, exactly, has this crew been up to for the past quarter century, when the district completely neglected its responsibility to build new schools?

What else?

Spending other people's money.

That's what the LAUD seems to do best.