Butt Out of Belmont

The Los Angeles City Council should butt out of the controversy over the Belmont Learning Complex. Building schools is not a city responsibility. The council has no business telling the school board what to do, especially at this late date.

Twelve of the 15 members of the council demanded Friday that completion of Belmont, a fiasco sitting half-built on environmentally tainted land, be reconsidered. Or else, they added, the council will hold up construction of new schools on permit technicalities.

The school board, which recently voted to mothball the Belmont site and build smaller schools nearby instead, should not cave in to blackmail.

Though the state and local school districts provide most of the money for school construction, the City Council’s obstructionist tactics could slow progress. Friday’s vote also sends the wrong message to Sacramento at a time when the district has identified five available and environmentally usable sites for new campuses that would, among other things, relieve overcrowding at the old Belmont High School.

Mike Hernandez, who led the council maneuver and in whose district Belmont sits, offers no compelling reason to reignite this divisive and paralyzing debate. He has offered no evidence to prompt new environmental scrutiny of the site, an abandoned oil field that contains potentially explosive methane gas and toxic substances.

A legion of public and private environmental authorities and public health experts has already weighed in. They differed on whether the location could be made safe, on cost and on the time that would be required to open the school, but they agreed that the site was never suitable for construction of a school.

The uncertainties over Belmont required the school board to make a very tough judgment. With the advice and agreement of the district’s new leadership team, interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines and Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller, a majority voted in January to abandon the $200-million project and move on. That decision should not be undermined. School board members too are elected officials, ones who represent a constituency larger than the council’s.

Questions about the motives for the council’s day-late/dollar-short decision remain: What is this fight really about? Is it about the council winning a political battle with the mayor at any cost? Is it about scratching the backs of well-connected lobbyists and the powerful lawyers at O’Melveny & Myers, which is being sued by the school district for its advisory role in the Belmont deal?

Children who need schools close to home have nothing to gain from the City Council’s intrusions. The district is heading into difficult reforms and needs help--not obstacles--as it struggles to build badly needed new schools.