Focus on New Schools, Mr. Romer

Los Angeles schools chief Roy Romer is reigniting the debate over the environmentally plagued Belmont Learning Complex by calling for an assessment of the property’s ultimate use and renewing the possibility that it might still become a school. Raising that farfetched possibility at this point is more likely to prolong than end an expensive controversy.

The superintendent is asking the school board to approve completion of an aborted environmental study to determine the best uses of the site, an old oil field tainted with potentially explosive methane gas and hydrogen sulfide. He seeks a comparative analysis of the costs to mitigate the risks on the property for use as parkland, for residential or commercial buildings . . . or for a school.

Five of the seven members of the board voted seven months ago to halt construction of the high school for safety and cost reasons. They made their decision after extensive and conflicting analyses from public and private experts. It is not at all clear what another study would do, except rub salt in political wounds and perhaps interfere with the process of quickly finding alternate sites for schools to replace the jammed, aging Belmont High School.

Romer, new to the job and Southern California, needs to get at the elusive truths of this divisive issue, to learn how the gleaming unfinished buildings became a case study in the wrong way to build a high school. He also needs to understand how the district wasted approximately $175 million building a school on a suspect site without the necessary environmental analysis or the safeguards needed to mitigate health risks.

This matter of great public interest is being discussed by the superintendent and the board in closed session because of two lawsuits: one filed by the Los Angeles Unified School District against its lawyers in the Belmont deal, O’Melveny & Myers, and one filed against the district by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund seeking to reverse the board’s decision to kill the project. The confidentiality, though legally required, will not help this process.

Parents and students who live near the old Belmont High School have been waiting 20 years for a new campus. Overcrowding requires the busing of 2,000 students to distant campuses in the San Fernando Valley. Where are the new sites they were promised earlier this year to replace the stalled Belmont Learning Complex? Renewed debate about completion of the campus should not be allowed to slow the already creeping process of building new schools.