Belmont Hearing Frustrates Legislators

They came looking for culprits. But for the most part, state legislators who held a special hearing Friday to probe what’s gone wrong at the Los Angeles school district’s newest high school came away with more questions than solid suspects.

“Does the buck stop anywhere?” an exasperated state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) said after sitting through hours of testimony from district staff and others about the Belmont Learning Complex, now half-complete just west of downtown.

The special hearing, held in the district’s board room, was convened by three separate legislative committees after recent revelations that district officials pushed ahead with the high school complex despite a warning five years ago that they lacked a comprehensive environmental review.

That decision has now come back to haunt the district, as new discoveries of explosive methane and traces of carcinogenic benzene are expected to inflate its price tag by $10 million or more. The $200-million project is already considered the most expensive high school in state history.

“There is a zeal to build schools for kids, and it should never override the safety factor,” Richard K. Mason, the district’s general counsel, conceded Friday after a long day of testimony. “Here, the zeal to build has overridden the safety factor farther than it should have.”

Otherwise, little stunning or new emerged from the hearing, as legislators queried school staffers about the steps they took to acquire and clean up the 35-acre site at 1st Street and Beaudry Avenue.

But there were plenty of examples of how responsibility for the project was diffused.

For instance, district officials have continually maintained that they enlisted the help of the state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources to locate more than a dozen wells on the property, which includes portions of an oil field.

On Friday, however, Richard K. Baker, an agency official, said the district never bothered to come back for a final sign-off from the agency--probably because the state gas and oil experts had only advisory powers and no official control.

Even Dominic Shambra--the district’s former planning director and the man most closely identified with Belmont--asserted that he shouldn’t be made to shoulder full blame for environmental problems--even though he signed documents sent to Sacramento during the early 1990s verifying that environmental conditions had been met at the property.

Shambra explained that he did that only after relying on the expertise of others, whom he had co-sign. The documents were necessary to release $30 million to buy a major portion of the land for Belmont in March 1994.