Is Air Conditioning Work Stalling Other Repairs?

The citizens committee overseeing Los Angeles’ $2.4-billion school repair bond contended Thursday that the rush to air-condition schools has stalled virtually all other large-scale bond-funded construction and maintenance work in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Committee members based their allegations on the official tally of major work performed, which indicates that all 22 jobs under construction involve air conditioning.

The immediate pipeline looks no different: The next 20 jobs on which work is scheduled to begin also are air conditioning projects, as are 48 of the 57 projects in the construction bidding process, the next tier of work to come.

Only about 15% of the funds raised by Proposition BB, passed overwhelmingly by voters in April, is to be spent on air conditioning.

“Why is everybody spending their time on air conditioning when we were told over and over that doing air conditioning would not slow down other work?” asked oversight committee Chairman Steven Soboroff.

Another committee member, Deputy City Controller Timothy Lynch, said he was particularly concerned that no plumbing jobs have begun because plumbing was featured prominently in campaign advertisements and literature used to persuade more than 70% of voters to approve the bond. He questioned why 85 roof projects were only in the planning process, while the threat of heavier than usual rains from El Nino still hangs over the region.

District staff members said the tally does not include the smaller jobs--those worth less than $50,000--that they are performing with their own team of contractors, rather than the program manager hired by the district to oversee the bond expenditures. Those smaller jobs, they said, include painting, plumbing and installing security grates over windows.

A new budget detailing the $20 million in bond funds spent indicates that nearly $1.6 million has been spent on exterior paint, almost $2 million on interior paint and $2 million on the security grills. But far more--almost $10 million--has been spent on air conditioning, and another $19 million in air conditioning contracts has been committed.

Board of Education member Vicki Castro, who attended Thursday’s meeting, blamed the oversight committee for inadvertently bogging down the expenditure of bond funds by focusing excessively on the question of who should control the air conditioning work--the district’s program manager or outside energy consortiums championed by Soboroff.

The two consortiums are in the final throes of bidding to complete the remainder of the air conditioning work, about $270 million worth. The oversight committee unanimously recommended Thursday that the Board of Education make a decision in early February.

Castro also said she thought the pace of work had been slowed by the oversight committee’s repeated advice that principals carefully review their lists of repairs for errors and change requests.

“It was not the Board of Education that told principals, ‘Go back and look at your [work],’ ” she said.

Another bond committee member, David Barulich--appointed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.--threatened to resign during Thursday’s tense meeting unless the school board adopts better systems of accountability, including strict construction timelines, for the Proposition BB work.

The Jarvis association, a self-styled taxpayer watchdog group, was wooed in the final days of the Proposition BB campaign to help court the conservative voters who were considered key to the bond gaining the necessary two-thirds vote.

The citizens oversight committee--another creation of the bond measure intended to sway voters--doesn’t “really have the ability to hold anyone accountable,” Barulich said. He contended that air conditioning is the only category of bond work on a rigid schedule. “All the rest just gets done when it gets done.”

Barulich blamed delays in other kinds of work partly on the fact that the district has not yet paid any of the 10 project managers assigned to work under the program manager and coordinate repairs and construction at campuses in different regions of the district.

“If I’m the project manager, I don’t know how much attention I’m going to give to this if I’m not getting paid,” he said.

District facilities manager Beth Louargand blamed the delay in payment on belated invoices, delivered just before the winter break, and the lack of insurance forms filed by the firms, which is a state requirement.

In other action, the oversight committee--responding to criticism that some playgrounds had been paved over without creating any new green space--unanimously passed a resolution requesting the school board to halt all paving projects immediately. The bond panel has been working with the nonprofit TreePeople group to try to find ways to incorporate grass, trees and other vegetation into playgrounds that have traditionally looked more like parking lots than play spaces.

Louargand produced a list from the 12 schools where paving is underway, indicating that only four requested green space.

Committee members contended that principals are afraid to commit to landscaping they cannot maintain because of drastic cutbacks in district gardeners over the past decade. Board member Castro has a pending motion that would set aside $1 million this year to pay for additional gardening.