Alarmed by reports of environmental "hot spots" on the site of a new high school just south of downtown, neighborhood activists demanded a meeting in the summer of 2003 with officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District.
They recalled promises by L.A. Unified officials that the school district would not repeat the mistakes of Belmont, a $180-million high school complex temporarily abandoned in the late 1990s because it had been built without protection over pockets of potentially explosive methane gas.
"We were assured that, especially after Belmont, the school would be clean," said Cecilia Nunez, a founder of the grass-roots group Neighbors for an Improved Community. "We didn't need to be concerned.... We accepted that as God's truth."
What school officials failed to say at the time, however, was that their handpicked developer had violated the district's environmental specifications by using hundreds of cubic yards of fill from a stockpile contaminated with carcinogenic PCBs and high levels of harmful petroleum byproducts, according to public and confidential records obtained by The Times.
In fact, the records show, school officials failed to tell state environmental regulators that the fill was already in the ground when the regulators ordered the school district not to use it. L.A. Unified officials kept mum for two years, despite a state law requiring school districts to notify regulators whenever contaminants are detected at a school construction site, records and interviews show.
School district officials are now scrambling to test the potential toxicity of the fill used under the administration building at the 19-acre site, a month before the campus is supposed to open as the city's first new comprehensive high school in three decades.
Community leaders, stung by the revelation that the school district withheld information about the tainted debris, say that no matter what the tests show, they want the district to remove the contaminated material, which also lies under the gymnasium.
"We were promised a clean school," Nunez said in an interview last week. "It can't be 'kind of contaminated' ... or 'partially contaminated.' It has to be clean."
Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry said L.A. Unified's handling of the debris problem has become a matter of institutional trust as school officials embark on a $14.4-billion initiative to build 160 schools and renovate hundreds more.
