LAUSD SEARCH FOR LAND CENSURED; STATE AUDITORS FIND REFORM PLEDGE HOLLOW.

Byline: Terri Hardy Sacramento Bureau

The Los Angeles Unified School District keeps on failing to do proper environmental studies and continues to disregard state guidelines in its search for new school sites, state auditors claimed Wednesday.

District officials, saying policies have been improved in their search for as many as 150 sites for new schools, disputed the audit's findings.

But the audit, saying the LAUSD board has yet to ratify new guidelines, warns that a flawed site-selection process keeps board members, as well as the rest of the community, in the dark and could block state construction funds for the district.

The information raises new concerns that the district is not following through on promises to examine potential environmental problems before settling on new school sites: promises that officials made to gain $278 million up front to build 49 schools in areas where schools are seriously crowded.

Assemblyman Scott Wildman, D-Burbank, a member of the State Allocation Board that approves school funding, said he will call for an immediate assessment of the district's compliance.

``In addition to the audit findings, I have been told that there has been an underground effort by the district to circumvent these procedures. It's business as usual at the LAUSD,'' Wildman said. ``I'm very concerned that unless they immediately clean up their act in the next six months, I don't know if they will ever be able to build new schools.''

State Sen. Richard Alarcon, D-Van Nuys, who requested the audit, said the report shows that, despite promising changes, new members of the school board are acting ``just as irresponsibly as their predecessors.''

Last year district officials agreed to accept oversight by the state Department of Toxic Substances Control and seek its certification that each school site is safe from environmental hazards, but the school board has yet to sign that agreement, the audit says.

``It's time to face reality,'' Alarcon wrote in a letter to school board president Genethia H. Hayes. ``The audit makes it clear that little has changed regarding how the district selects school sites. You repeatedly find ways to circumvent community participation and ignore state guidelines.''

Howard Miller, the LAUSD's chief operating officer, disputes the audit's findings, saying the district regularly does preliminary environmental studies as soon as it begins to consider a property.

50 studies

Miller said he recently received the results of 50 such studies, some of which showed potential environmental problems. He said that some of those were from the 49 sites for which the district got funds, but could not say how many.

Doug Cordiner, the principal auditor assigned to the LAUSD report, said ``that doesn't square with what Miller told us; he never expressed any disagreement with the findings.''

In a Dec. 14 letter to the auditor, Miller said he was ``in complete agreement with (the audit's) findings and recommendations.''

On Wednesday, Miller said he only agreed with audit findings that showed the district in the past had failed to involve the community in the decision-making process.

District officials told state auditors that no environmental studies were done for the 49 potential sites because they have not made final choices. But district officials identified sites in a document approved by the state Board of Education and told the State Allocation Board that land had been chosen.

In addition to getting up-front money toward 49 sites, district officials are searching for at least 47 more sites. Cordiner said campuses have been selected for 43 of the 47 but environmental studies have been done for less than half that number.

Factors not considered

The audit says the district does not adequately consider environmental issues, such as soil contamination, when first evaluating a property. And while LAUSD officials will check to see if a potential school site is near a highway with no sound buffer, they have done a poor job of checking whether there are hazardous wastes on or near the property.

Because of district officials' lax evaluation of land, 16 schools are under construction or already built ``on or in close proximity to sites containing hazardous substances,'' the audit says, and two additional schools are on land under suspicion of environmental troubles.

The district has been required to do some soil analysis recently by the state and has turned over environmental evaluations from the real estate department to the environmental branch. But auditors said it is too early to tell the outcome.

The audit says the district does only minimal analysis of public acceptance of a site choice and of the costs of using alternate sites.

When auditors contrasted the district's selection procedure and state recommendations, they found ``the district's procedure does not provide sufficient guidance for staff to evaluate potential sites.''

Evaluations not done

Failure to evaluate sites well can be enormously costly, as at the unfinished Belmont Learning Center and at South Gate High School and South Gate Elementary School, both with massive toxic problems. At Belmont, the school board approved starting what has become the costliest high school project in the nation without knowledge that it was violating state law in the purchase land, containing oil pipelines, that had been used to dispose of waste oil products, according to the audit.

The `district staff has not always given the board accurate, complete information,'' the audit says about staff recommendations to the board to order feasibility studies and later acquire specific sites.

Auditors found, for example, that the district staff pressured an outside environmental consultant to replace a critical air quality assessment, one that found emissions from a gasoline station and a dry-cleaning store across the street could be harmful to children, with a more positive assessment prepared by the district's own environmental branch.

In the haste to acquire school sites, sometimes district personnel fail to include the public in the search and to look for alternative sites, the report says.

In the haste to qet matching funds for all schools, district personnel also have failed to give top priority to the search for sites in areas most in need of schools, as identified in a 1998 master plan.

Working under a self-imposed deadline of July 1, 2000, the district has attempted to identify and qualify all potential schools for state matching funds.

``By trying to do too much in the time allotted and not focusing its efforts on the highest-priority schools, the district risks the loss of matching funds for the most-needed new schools,'' the audit says.