The Buck Stops Nowhere

The L.A. Unified School District, never a shining example of educational planning, has done it again. This time it’s a nightmare called the Belmont Learning Center.

No one has ever doubted that a growing area needs a healthy supply of high schools, sports stadiums and jails to meet the various requirements of its booming population.

As a result, the new Twin Towers County Jail was built, the Staples Center sports arena is under construction and Belmont was given the final go-ahead.

However, unlike the jail, which is a veritable beehive of activity, and the progress being made on the Staples complex, the so-called learning center sits like an unfinished tomb on the edge of downtown, perhaps never to be finished at all.

That may be best, because if it ever is completed and populated, it could blow up.

You know the story. We all discovered in a flash of light that the $200-million center was being built on an abandoned oil well with a number of potential hazards.

These include the carcinogen benzene, potentially explosive methane and other things floating atop the shallow ground water that could probably create two-headed mutants if sniffed or swallowed.

Covering it with concrete, namely the learning center, could block the escape of methane gas, causing it to explode, blowing a lot of high school students into confetti.

So construction was mostly halted and now the thrust of the effort within the LAUSD and beyond isn’t what do we do to fix it, but who’s to blame?

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Students of civic idiocy will recall that L.A.’s current disaster came to light in a 200-page report compiled by Don Mullinax, the Board of Education’s top auditor.

A former Defense Department investigator, he was appointed only after a Times article pointed out what the school district should have already known, that the environmental assessment of the former oil field was inadequate and no one was doing anything about it.

Mullinax leaped at the project like a pit bull at a mailman’s behind and came up with a report that either criticized or blamed lawyers, educators, builders, architects, developers, the state of California and anyone else who might have been passing by at the time.

An attorney, David Cartwright, who helped craft the deal that resulted in Belmont, was an early victim of the burgeoning fireball. Looking around for someone to blame, they fired him. Cartwright predicted that others would also be purged, adding, “You have to kill everyone, because you can’t keep anyone alive to tell the tale.” Well said.

Meanwhile, most of those cited in the Mullinax Papers are pointing fingers in all directions without anyone saying, “The finger stops here.” School Supt. Ruben Zacarias, criticized for “failure to supervise,” is talking about filing a defamation suit against Mullinax, whom he appointed in the first place. It gets stupider and stupider.

At the same time, state Assemblyman Scott Wildman is calling for a criminal investigation. Fortunately, we do have that new county jail, so that if anyone involved in the sordid story ends up there, it is my understanding that the facilities are modern and comfortable.

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School board member David Tokofsky, who has been opposed to the Belmont Center since the beginning, calls it “the full Belmonty” to emphasize the ridiculous nature of the fiasco. His reference is to the British movie “The Full Monty,” which featured male strippers. The full monty means showing it all.

To begin with, Tokofsky was against the size of the 5,000-student school, favoring smaller schools in neighborhoods. It was the “downtown mentality” that ended up with the “monstrosity” at Temple and Beaudry, he says, with all of the subsequent problems. He and other school board members also wanted a better environmental report at the outset but were overruled.

“Have we learned from all this?” he asks. “Well, they’re planning on building another new complex, this one a combined high school and elementary school, in South Gate, in the old World War II defense industry corridor. It will be over chromium and near high-pressure pipes. South Gate proves we haven’t internalized Belmont yet.”

He suggests that if the district does start building smaller schools, it will probably build them over gas stations.

What the Belmont Project leaves us with is a brick-and-stucco, southwest-pink, unfinished disaster, an atmosphere of animosity, a pot full of investigations and no one at fault.

But a large lesson evolves from what Oliver Hardy might call one fine mess: We’re beginning to understand why kids won’t take responsibility for their own actions. They’ve learned from us that the buck doesn’t stop anywhere anymore.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at [email protected]