THE VIEW FROM HERE - Poor Adriana Berrera! Last week she embarrassed Los Angeles Community College District’s Chancellor Daniel LaVista and the Board of Trustees by submitting a staff report that inadvertently told the truth. And as we have seen so many times before, telling the truth at the cesspool of LACCD can get you stuck in the slime.
Berrera is the LACCD Vice Chancellor in charge of the Van de Kamp “Innovation” Center. Although the Los Angeles Superior Court has ordered LACCD to terminate the Alliance for College-Ready Public School’s (a 9-12 charter high school) lease of the New Education Building on the Van de Kamps campus, LACCD is defying the order by filing what we believe is a frivolous court appeal.
But LACCD is proceeding to comply with other parts of the Superior Court’s order to bring itself into compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act. Now there are two ways that LACCD could do this: (1) Begin offering the Community Service and Academic Classes originally proposed for Van de Kamps which is already consistent with existing environmental documents, or (2) Prepare a new EIR to support a decision to do anything else like, say, trying to keep Eli Broad and Richard Riordan’s Alliance Charter School in possession of the campus.
The first option would cost the taxpayers $0 because of the existing environmental documents. The second option would cost the taxpayers $222,000. Guess which option the Board of Trustees chose last Wednesday? Yep. Let’s waste $222,000 more in order to avoid offering Community College programming and instead re-install the Alliance Charter School with a new environmental document. The vote was tied 3-3 when LACCD Board President Steve Veres cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of spending more money.
OK, so how did Berrera goof it up? She and Chancellor Daniel LaVista issued a staff report stating that the purpose of the $222,000 study was to “provide those specialized services required to continue the use of the facilities by the existing tenants. . . .” Oops. That’s probably the truth but Berrera and LaVista were not supposed to tell the public because right now, the LACCD Board is performing an elaborate Kabuki dance pretending to be carefully considering 10 options for future use of the Van de Kamps campus.
Disclosing the purpose of the environmental review study as keeping the existing tenants suggests the decision was already made. And if it was already made, it was made in violation of the Brown Act (at no public meeting) and before the Board will conduct a meeting at Van de Kamps on September 19th where it claims it wants to hear from the public about the future use of the Van de Kamps campus.
Darn that Adriana Berrera! She just can’t help telling the truth! Sources inside LACCD have informed the Van de Kamps Coalition that Berrera and others are already negotiating an extended lease of the New Education Building to Alliance School even though the environmental study and the Board’s “careful consideration” of options are going on in public.
So just before last week’s meeting, LACCD officials scrambled to post a “revised” staff report. The new report belatedly claims that the $222,000 study’s purpose is to evaluate in detail all four options the Board recently chose from the original ten options. But as Board member Nancy Pearlman correctly pointed out, environmental studies are not normally used to chose the preferred alternative but rather, the preferred alternative is chosen and then the environmental review is made of that project (with a lesser examination of the alternatives).
Has the LACCD Board (excluding Pearlman) already made the decision to extend the Alliance School lease? Who knows? It sure looks like it by reading the political tea leaves strewn about by Adriana Berrera.
The Van de Kamps believes the message to the public is clear. The LACCD Board has its marching orders from those who fund the campaigns of Board members. The Board will do what it is told to do: Hand the Van de Kamps Campus over to the monied interests that now run our schools and the public’s input is nothing but a sham shadow game. Think of this the next time you are in the voting booth or making out your tax check to the Los Angeles County Tax Collector.
(Miki Jackson and Laura Gutierrez are members of the Van de Kamps Coalition and CityWatch contributors. Miki Jackson can be reached at [email protected]) –cw
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 69
Pub: Aug 28, 2012
