Bond Pact Now Haunts L.A. Schools

In the waning days of the April election campaign, backers of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s $2.4-billion bond measure made a pact with the district’s own particular devil. Now, that decision has come back to burn them.

Worried that conservative voters would doom Proposition BB because it raises property taxes, campaign brokers opened negotiations with one of its frequent combatants, the state’s largest tax watchdog organization.

What they had in mind was a straight trade with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.: an endorsement of the school repair and construction measure in return for giving the Jarvis group a slot on the bond oversight committee. The same deal had won over Mayor Richard Riordan earlier in the campaign.

But the Jarvis group balked, and in the end the district gave the slot up anyway in exchange for nothing more than permission to feature the group on a last-minute mailer to crucial Republican voters.

Now, faced with the first controversy of the new bond--the pricey Belmont High School--the district is being second-guessed at every move by the taxpayer association’s representative on the Proposition BB Blue Ribbon Citizens Oversight Committee.

Like a bronco rider, David Barulich--an advocate of home schooling and government vouchers for private schools--has grabbed hold of the Belmont controversy and will not let go.

Barulich has joined the lawsuit against the district over alleged flaws in planning the Temple Street and Beaudry Avenue campus. He is challenging the district’s efforts to hurry the committee’s review of the $87-million project, including the district’s request that the committee hold an emergency meeting today.

“We should not be forced to jump through hoops” just because the school board approved a development agreement that attorneys now say allows penalties of up to $12,000 a day for delays, he wrote in a weekend fax to other committee members and district attorneys.

Yet as uncomfortable as the marriage between the district and the Jarvis group may be, it is one that political observers predict will prove increasingly convenient for public agencies as they seek to score the tortuous two-thirds’ majority required for local bond measures in this 20th year of Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax measure co-written by Jarvis.

“Once you think of it, it’s a fairly obvious way to deal with the two-thirds requirement, but I’m not aware of anybody else who’d ever done it,” said Darry Sragow, chief political consultant for the school bond.

The oversight panel was set up with no official power to reverse a school board decision on the use of bond money. But a judge has ruled that the Belmont project cannot proceed without the panel’s approval.

The Jarvis association’s president, Joel Fox, reports that he has been approached by another public agency looking for his support of a tax measure in exchange for representation on an oversight committee. He said he turned that offer down.

“Our answer to them and anyone else is: ‘Let’s see if this works out,’ ” Fox said. “If this oversight committee is phony, if the [school] board overrules it, then . . . we’re not interested.”

For district officials, what the deal promises are headaches that probably will last for the life of the bond. Barulich’s pressure on the Belmont project figures to be only the start.

Not only has his association weighed in on the lawsuit against the district over Belmont, but he has publicly accused the oversight committee’s chairman of being a “cheerleader” for the development project. And, in multi-page faxes to other committee members and the news media, he is posing question after probing question.

All of that leads toward the scariest question of all for those district officials who have spent the last two years hammering out an exclusive development agreement with one developer: Why not just start over, putting the project out to competitive, potentially cheaper bid?

Or as Barulich put it after being told by one district negotiator that the developer was chosen for “creativity” of design, not price: “Believe me, taxpayers care about the price.”

Barulich said he feels that he must prove to skeptical conservatives that the watchdog group did not sell out by joining the bond push, albeit halfheartedly, and perhaps nudging the tax measure over the top after a near-miss in November’s election. The average homeowner’s property taxes will rise by as much as $100 a year to pay for the bond measure.

“A lot of people in the right flank felt [the Jarvis group’s involvement] made the difference and the pressure is on me to show we’re going to do the right job for the taxpayers,” he said. “The first project is an important one, because it sets the tone . . . and it turns out it’s an easy one to be tough on.”

Publicly, the district puts the best possible face on the arrangement. It says that Barulich is an important addition to the committee and is asking valid questions about the controversial public-private venture that promises to include retail stores and public housing.

But privately, some officials express irritation, citing in particular the Howard Jarvis organization’s participation in the lawsuit against the Belmont project.

Filed by two unions, the suit pushes for power to oversee all aspects of the 2-year-old Belmont project, not merely whether it would receive bond funding.

“I think this district is going to regret this for a long while,” said one official, who requested anonymity. “This first lawsuit sets it up that every time that committee doesn’t agree with [the Jarvis group], they’ll go to court.”

Jarvis association President Fox said he does not anticipate ongoing litigation. But if that’s what it takes to keep the district honest, then so be it.

It was Fox who inadvertently invited his group into the school bond campaign by writing a commentary that ran in The Times on March 30. In it, Fox acknowledged the severe need for repairs and construction in the district, then set up his essay to answer the question: Will taxpayers get their money’s worth if they vote for the school bond?

The next day, campaign organizers called Fox and offered the Jarvis group a spot on the oversight committee in exchange for an endorsement.

The opinion piece landed at a nervous moment in the campaign, just as polls were showing the measure on the verge of passage--if some of the undecided voters could be persuaded.

Whether the Howard Jarvis cachet sealed the victory or whether it was unneeded icing remains a matter of some debate. School board President Jeff Horton thinks that it was a good call: “It was sort of like an endorsement and that was definitely an asset in the campaign--the very unlikeliness of it was what made it so important.”

Fox decided that the volunteer oversight job would be too big for him and offered it to Barulich because of his long-standing interest in schools.

Through three oversight committee meetings, Barulich has emerged as the most outspoken member, although he has been joined in his intense questions about the Belmont project by several others--notably Los Angeles Deputy City Controller Timothy Lynch and Richard Phillips, who represents the Structural Engineers Assn. of Southern California.

Although Fox acknowledges that he has asked Barulich to tone down his sometimes strident style, he applauds his work so far. Barulich also remains proud of his efforts.

“I don’t have a reputation to worry about like some of the others,” Barulich said. “I’m not running for public office.”

That attitude has gotten him into hot water with Latinos pushing for the new Belmont High School to be built in their neighborhood west of downtown. They were first outraged at his suggestion at a school board meeting that the area was simply a point of entry for immigrants and perhaps not stable enough to support a 3,600-student school over the long term. Later, they took offense when Barulich mouthed the words “shut up” to a Latino teacher at the oversight committee’s first public meeting.

To those who label him a white racist, Barulich points out that his wife is Latina and that he lives in well-integrated Highland Park.

“Let them say what they want. I feel like saying, ‘If you only knew me,’ ” he said.