LAUSD TRIES TO SWAY FEDS TO GIVE UP SITE.

Byline: Sonia Giordani Staff Writer

WILSHIRE CENTER - Los Angeles school leaders made a last-ditch effort Tuesday to persuade the Social Security Administration to give up its lease on a site slated for a new public elementary school.

``There is still a way that we can solve this,'' said Caprice Young, board president of the Los Angeles Unified School District. ``All they have to do is agree that they will work with us to find an alternate site.''

Young and several community leaders held a press conference outside the building at Wilton Place and Wilshire Boulevard in Wilshire Center.

The district had hoped to build a primary center there for 500 pupils from kindergarten through second grade. But the nation's second-largest school district may have met its match in Uncle Sam.

``It would be a violation of the law for us to break our contract,'' said SSA Area Director Sheila Leiter, who said the agency strictly followed the federal government's policy for leasing space.

She said the SSA is liable for the full 15-year term of the lease signed with the building's owner.

``We first found the space in the summer of 2000. It took us a year to get us to the signed lease. It isn't something that happens overnight. We had to prepare the floor plan, negotiate with the union. All these things have to go into place in a timely and steady manner.''

The agency has spent more than $1 million on plans and furnishings to date and plans to move in by the end of July.

But LAUSD officials said they had planned to build the new school since 1999 but couldn't outright buy the land then to reserve it for the proposed campus.

``The state precludes us from making an offer on a site until after we've finished our environmental review. Remember Belmont?'' said Young, alluding to the Belmont Learning Center fiasco in which school officials purchased a downtown parcel for a school site that turned out to have high levels of methane and hydrogen sulfide gases beneath the soil.

``This is one of the reforms that came after Belmont,'' Young said.

The district stands to lose $10 million in state construction funds if it can't get the site back from the feds.

``If it had been anybody but the federal government, we could have just negotiated the purchase of a site through eminent domain,'' Young said, referring to the legal process by which government agencies can require private landowners - but not the federal government - to sell their property for a fair market value.