WE CAN RAISE OUR VOICES TO BRING BACK THE VAN DE KAMPS COMMUNITY COLLEGE SATELLITE CAMPUS PROMISED BY THE LACCD BOARD OF TRUSTEES!
It appears the Los Angeles Mayor’s office has pulled the unemployment programs out of Van de Kamps in the face of your e-mails and letters two weeks ago. Thank you for raising your voice.
Now we must demand that the Los Angeles Community College District Board ask the State Controller and law enforcement officials to investigate the wrongdoing at Van de Kamps. The job will not be done until the wreckage at Van de Kamps is cleaned up by outside investigators.
Can you help by sending a quick e-mail to the board and other public officials?
The Van de Kamps Coalition hates to ask you in such a short time period to take further action, but your voice is critical in pushing the LACCD Board of Trustees to do the right thing.
A draft letter to the officials of Los Angeles Community College District and other officials in set forth below. The proposed letter below is self-explanatory. Details about the controversial conversion of the historic Van de Kamps Northeast Satellite Campus of LA City College into a “commercial leased-tenant facility” is found at http://www.vandekamps.org/.
This Wednesday, April 28, 2010, at the meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District (“LACCD”), the Board will consider two competing resolutions. You can view these resolutions yourself at: http://www.laccd.edu/board_of_trustees/board_agendas/
The resolutions are on pages 6-10 and 14 of the posted agenda package.
In one resolution, drafted and put on the Board’s meeting agenda by the Van de Kamps Coalition (“VDK Coalition”) would require the Chancellor to:
1. Order the securing and preservation of all Van de Kamps construction project records until public authorities can investigate possible wrongdoing.
2. Request that the State Controller’s Office conduct a Special Audit of Van de Kamps to determine the amount and responsibility for misspent Proposition 39 Bond funds that the VDK Coalition estimates to be about $7.1 million.
3. Request the assistance of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, County Counsel’s Office, and/or the Attorney General’s Office in making civil recovery of the lost funds to restore the public’s bond funds.
4. If a basis exists under the state law, to halt further invoice payments to the contractors at Van de Kamps who voluntarily participated in the wrongful destruction of classroom designs and substitution of tenant improvements to benefit the Workforce/Worksource unemployment programs the Los Angeles Mayor’s office wanted to install in the historic Van de Kamps Bakery Building.
Board Trustee Miguel Santiago, who has been a champion on the LACCD Board of Trustees for an investigation of the Van de Kamps, has offered an alternative resolution. His resolution would order:
1. The Chancellor of LACCD to order the Inspector General, once he or she is hired by the LACCD Board, to conduct a review of the appropriateness of the expenditure of bond dollars for the Van de Kamps site.
2. The Inspector General to conduct an investigation of Van de Kamps within the first two months after the Inspector General is hired by the District.
3. That upon advice of the District’s General Counsel, the Inspector General’s Report be reviewed by the attorneys defending the District against the pending California Environmental Quality Act lawsuit to “ensure that the report does not jeopardize the District’s position in the litigation.”
4. That upon advice of the District’s General Counsel, “all portions of the report that do not need to be privileged be published in order to assure accountability for use of bond dollars.”
While the VDK Coalition appreciates the spirit in which Trustee Santiago sought to offer an alternative resolution to conduct an investigation in-house, unfortunately, the District’s General Counsel has intervened into his resolution to provide a basis for the LACCD’s staff to say it is conducting an investigation of the truth, and then decide for itself what part of the truth the public needs to know.
How else can anyone construe the language of the District’s Resolution that says the District will release all portions of the report that “do not need to be privileged”? What? “Do not NEED to be privileged”?
In this context, the only privilege that might exist is communication LACCD staff had with the General Counsel that constituted advice in the context of an attorney-client relationship. It depends upon the facts surrounding the communication. Yet the General Counsel has inserted herself into Trustee Santiago’s resolution: She argues that what will be withheld from the public will depend upon the NEED to be privileged. And precisely who will decide the NEED to be privileged? The Inspector General? The LACCD Board who hires and fires the Inspector General? The District’s General Counsel? How long has the General Counsel been withholding from the VDK Coalition and other members of the public records she thinks “need to be privileged” instead of records that “are privileged under state law”?
This claim is incredible. It is a guarantee that the District’s General Counsel will later to provide a NEED to withhold information on a dubious claim it is “privileged.” The VDK Coalition is unaware of how a report on financial transactions concerning a public works project would contain any attorney-client privileged information in the first place. It should simply report the facts shown in the project records, and draw conclusions, including whether laws or rules were broken. That is what an Inspector General does. And the LACCD’s bond counsel has already issued a memo stating tenant improvements are NOT lawful expenditures under Proposition 39 restrictions in California’s Constitution.
And since when does the LACCD’s possibly losing a California Environmental Quality Act case because the truth came out, trump the right of the public to know how its money has been spent (or misspent)? The suggestion is preposterous. The District’s interest in not losing a pending case cannot override the public’s greater interest in obtaining the truth about misspent bond funds and hold LACCD staff accountable for its actions.
The Van de Kamps Coalition, for almost a decade, worked to save the historic Van de Kamps bakery building and helped former State Senator Richard Polanco and LACCD officials to bring a Northeast Campus of Los Angeles City College to an area of the City that studies showed needed an access point to the community college system. We need your voice to hold LAACD to its promises.
IF YOU ARE AVAILABLE ON WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 2010 at 3:30 p.m., your voice and/or appearance is requested:
Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees Meeting
Los Angeles Harbor College
Seahawk Center – 2nd Floor
1111 Figueroa Place
Wilmington, CA 90744
IF YOU ARE NOT AVAILABLE ON WEDNESDAY:
The Van de Kamps Coalition is asking Los Angeles residents from all over the City to cut and paste the draft letter below to the list of recipients to help demand that the LACCD Board to Trustees bring in outside persons, free from any LACCD authority, to properly investigate the wrongdoing at Van de Kamps.
CUT AND PASTE THE FOLLOWING E-MAIL ADDRESSES INTO YOUR “TO” ADDRESS:
mayor@lacity.org, councilmember.garcetti@lacity.org, councilmember.reyes@lacity.org, senator.cedillo@sen.ca.gov, assemblymember.deleon@assembly.ca.gov, larry.frank@lacity.org, georgia@gmercer.net, candaele@sbcglobal.net, mfield@laccd.edu, mfield@glendale.edu, tpark@email.laccd.edu, nancysuepearlman@aol.com, msantiago@email.laccd.edu, justincl@laccd.edu, webmail@da.lacounty.gov, vdkcoalition@gmail.com
April 27, 2010
RE: Outside Officials Must Investigate LACCD Wrongdoing at Van de Kamps
Dear LACCD Trustees:
I am writing in support of the VDK Coalition’s proposed resolution on your April 28, 2010 meeting agenda.
I am informed that the research and work of the Van de Kamps Coalition reveals likely misuse of up to $7.1 million of voter-approved Proposition 39 bond funds. These funds were used to destroy the classroom designs at the Northeast Satellite Campus of Los Angeles City College at the historic Van de Kamps Bakery and replace them with designs intended to solely benefit the proposed tenants funded by the Mayor’s Office. Additionally, the VDK Coalition, as outlined in its proposed resolution before the Board, has evidence that LACCD staff may have evaded provisions of the Public Contract Code. The VDK Coalition reports that LACCD staff made millions of dollars of changes to the historic Van de Kamps Bakery Building without re-bidding of the project as mandated under state law.
I understand that even LACCD’s bond counsel has informed YOU that these expenditures are illegal and YOU are continuing to spend bond funds to finish the building for a lease arrangement that was withdrawn from consideration at your last Board meeting. I am informed by the Van de Kamps Coalition that the item on the April 28, 2010 meeting agenda to pay over $99,000 for custom cabinetry in the VDK Bakery Building is a continued waste of Measure J bond funds for the benefit of tenant improvements to the building. Why would you approve these expenditures when the Mayor’s tenants have now fled the scene of the crime?
I join the Van de Kamps Coalition and urge you to take strong and decisive action to request the State Controller’s office to conduct a Special Audit and request that appropriate law enforcement officials promptly investigate and seek recovery of the taxpayer bond funds from the responsible parties. The seriousness of the possible wrongdoing is beyond the capacity of the LACCD to internally investigate. This is especially true because LACCD currently has no Inspector General, and when hired, he or she will serve at the pleasure of the LACCD Board. Such an investigation would have no credibility.
When the voters previously supported the LACCD in three bond measure elections to pay for capital improvements and expansion of community college facilities, they certainly never contemplated such unlawful use of our tax funds. I will be watching the outcome of your meeting even though I am unable to attend your Board meeting scheduled this Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. when I am working.
Most sincerely,
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