FOREGONE CONCLUSION; SKIMPY DATA, EARLY DEADLINE FORCE BELMONT OVERSEERS TO HASTY DECISION.

Byline: Bryan Steele

THE Belmont Commission now seems to understand its untenable situation: It must make a decision that is structurally premature.

The driving force behind assuring Belmont is safe is the California Department of Toxic Substances Control. When the DTSC becomes involved with a project, it issues requirements that are passed through to an appropriate contractor. The contractor then devises a plan to satisfy these requirements.

Even before the contractor's plan is approved by the DTSC, everyone involved has a general idea how long the process will take.

In the case of Belmont, the DTSC made its requirements known last winter, where it was generally understood that compliance would take at least one year.

So what did the Los Angeles Unified School District do? It chartered the commission with former District Attorney Ira Reiner as executive director to decide the fate of Belmont months before the information necessary to make such a decision was available.

In other words, the commission was set up from Day One to make a pressured and ill-informed decision.

In order to understand how this happened, it is essential to realize who is internally driving the LAUSD's environmental efforts. Last fall, after the Legislature released its report that identified nine toxic school sites, Superintendent Ruben Zacarias announced the formation of a safety team.

What is generally not known is that half of the team's four members, Eric Nasarenko and Tom Soto, are public relations operatives. The third safety team member, Angelo Bellomo, is an environmental contractor with a long history with the LAUSD.

Bellomo first worked on contaminated LAUSD school sites 10 years ago when he was the area supervisor for the environmental contracting firm, McLaren Engineering. McLaren's 1989 assessment of the Belmont site was judged inadequate by the DTSC last year.

But Bellomo's involvement with the LAUSD doesn't stop with Belmont. He was involved with assessments at other toxic LAUSD sites the DTSC now considers inadequate, including two toxic school sites in South Gate.

Today, the last firm to employ Bellomo now receives a large share of the LAUSD's assessment and remediation contracts.

The fourth member of the safety team is Barry Groveman, who also has a long history with the LAUSD. Bellomo was first hired by the LAUSD back in 1988 and quickly began working on another toxic LAUSD site, Jefferson Middle School. Jefferson's remediation plan was approved by the DTSC only to be found inoperative.

Groveman is still embroiled in defending the district against a lawsuit brought by the Superfund site across the street from Jefferson. This suit is attempting to force the LAUSD into helping pay for shared groundwater contamination. Since the LAUSD indemnified the seller against future contamination liability when it purchased the Jefferson site, the district is now potentially on the hook for millions of dollars in clean-up costs.

In June of 1998, Groveman's associate attorney at Proskauer Rose, Jim Wakefield, testified before the Joint Legislative Audit Committee that everything was fine at Jefferson, despite an internal report issued a few weeks earlier to the contrary.

Based largely on that testimony, students and staff were allowed to occupy Jefferson a short time later.

Unfortunately, Groveman's team was not forthcoming about problems at Jefferson because it would have seriously hurt their defense in the Superfund site case.

Today, the DTSC is overseeing soil assessment at Jefferson on weekends, so as to not expose students and staff to further toxic risk.

With the likes of Bellomo and Groveman on staff, should anyone be surprised the LAUSD orchestrated an unrealistic deadline for the Belmont Commission? Bellomo and Groveman knew from the very beginning that the assessment work required by the DTSC would take months more than allowed by the commission's Oct. 20 deadline.

Compounding the commission's problems is the lack of experience by those offering various solutions. No one testifying before the commission to date has any experience with designing or constructing a 35-acre system of barriers and vapor extraction systems intended to cover an oil field over which sits a school.

The reason is that no one in their right mind would ever build a school on such a site. Instead, the commission is relying on landfill experts, whose experience is merely tangential to the problems facing Belmont, where pressurized oil will surely foul vapor extraction systems.

Furthermore, all the current efforts are taking place after the fact. Even landfills are designed and implemented well before trash begins arriving at the site.

In the case of Belmont, however, remediation designers must also deal with fully constructed buildings. The fact is that no one knows for sure what they are doing.

Since there is a direct correlation between the unknown dynamics of a project and the subsequent risks and cost overruns of that project, the commission is forced to make a decision based on speculation and hope.

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Photo: The Belmont Commission must decide the learning center's fate by Oct. 20.

David Sprague/Daily News