The result was an hour of public comment during which each group downplayed the concerns of the others. In the end, the board agreed to move forward with the plan at Virgil. The project could lose funding if it's not submitted to state officials by November 2009.
The site of the future playing fields is north of the school, partially on district-owned property and also on commercial land that the district would have to buy. Environmental reports show contamination from an alphabet soup of chemicals, including benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, vinyl chloride, MTBE, gasoline and perchloroethene, among others.
The sources of some of the underground water contamination are unknown, but at least one possible suspect is the nearby Midway Ford auto repair body shop.
If the source of the water toxics is not discovered and cleaned, it could recontaminate the water, which in turn could recontaminate the soil, according to a district consultant.
Under the current plan, the district would not just install a barrier but also dig wells outside the perimeter to monitor off-site contamination. The district must rely on regulatory agencies to compel outside businesses that are polluting the water to clean up their land, officials said.
That solution is less than satisfactory for Virgil Middle School sixth-grade math teacher Maria Magana, who appealed to the board Tuesday.
"Unless you control the sources of the contamination uphill," she said, "there's no sense in doing the cleanup."
The property was considered -- and rejected -- for an elementary school in the late 1980s and a high school in the early 1990s and again as a high school in 2000, after the school board voted to cancel the half-finished Belmont Learning Complex.
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evelyn.larrubia@latimes.com
