Multiple violations of state law and false claims about operating funds by LA Community College District Board draws lawsuit by Northeast taxpayers.
(Los Angeles, CA) A group of taxpayers of the Los Angeles Community College District (“LACCD”) announced they have filed suit seeking to invalidate a May 26, 2010 proposed lease of nearly half of the Northeast Satellite Campus of Los Angeles City College at the historic Van de Kamps Bakery to the City of Los Angeles. The lawsuit seeks to halt a deceptive effort of certain LACCD Board members and administrators to use the state budget crisis as a pretense to avoid finishing the decade-long plan to build and open a Satellite Campus to Los Angeles City College. Instead, LACCD officials have tried to hand off the $72 million taxpayer-financed campus to private corporations eager to rent the brand new buildings. The scheme would deny educational opportunity to young adults living in Northeast Los Angeles and substitute programs for the unemployed person from all over the City.
“Trustees Silvia Scott-Hayes, Mona Field, and Georgia Mercer have made false representations to the community that the state budget crisis prevents the District from opening the Northeast Campus as a community college satellite,” said Miki Jackson. “But the District’s own economic feasibility studies establish the fact that the Satellite campus could be opened with profitable non-credit courses in high demand and without the need of state budget funding, yet District officials continue to falsely claim the state budget would affect their ability to open the Van de Kamps site.”
Filed three weeks ago, attorneys for the taxpayers are in the process of serving the lawsuit on defendants LACCD, the City of Los Angeles and the intended lease beneficiaries: a group of privately-run workforce unemployment programs funded by federal economic stimulus funds and the Workforce Investment Act. “LACCD placed the Northeast Satellite Campus on its Proposition 39 project list as a promise to voters to build and open it using taxpayer-approved funds, but some kind of politically wired bait-and-switch is now underway to divert millions of dollars of new taxpayer-paid facilities to private corporate interests that appear to be linked to Mayor Villaraigosa,” observed Paul Heidenreich, an attorney who filed the taxpayer lawsuit on behalf of the taxpayer plaintiffs.
“Our taxpayer lawsuit focuses on how LACCD Facilities Director Larry Eisenberg allegedly oversaw the expenditure of at least $6.2 million of voter-approved Proposition 39 bond funds to convert a planned classroom building into administrative offices for the unemployment programs funded by the City of Los Angeles Workforce Investment Board,” said another plaintiff, Andrew Garsten. Records of the LACCD show that in the midst of building the new $72 million Northeast Satellite campus, subordinates reporting to Eisenberg, in violation of the state Contract Code, converted the value of the historic Van de Kamps Bakery Building construction contract to the benefit of the proposed unemployment program tenants championed by the City.
Under the California Constitution, community colleges that pass bond issues with only 55% of the vote are limited to using the bond monies for capital expenditures for construction of community college “school facilities.” The lawsuit challenges the LACCD’s use of Proposition 39 funds for changing the historic Van de Kamps Bakery Building into a huge unemployment office operated by outside private non-profits.
“Under Proposition 39 and Proposition 13, LACCD has no authority to use precious school bond funds to re-design and re-construct a school building into an office space for workforce bureaucrats – and yet, that is what LACCD did,” said Mr. Heidenreich. The Board could have decided on May 26, 2010 to return to a lawful course to use the building for community college classes, but instead it conferred millions of dollars of illegal taxpayer monies on private corporations by handing the historic bakery building over to the City of Los Angeles. The City plans to sublease 100 percent of the leased area to four private entities: Community Career Development, Inc., Worker Education and Resource Center, Inc., Archdiocesan Youth Employment (a program of Catholic Charities), and the Atwater Park Center, Inc.
In addition to the taxpayer claims, the lawsuit also seeks to invalidate the lease to the City of Los Angeles because Education Code rules on no-bid leasing were also violated. On April 14, 2010, the Board tried to lease this same space to Community Career Development using an Education Code provision that allows no-bid leases to ‘private educational institutions’, but when the community established that the proposed lessee did not qualify, the Board hastily canceled the proposal.
“Six weeks later, the Board returned with a new proposal to lease the same space to the City of Los Angeles but allow the City to sublease 100% of the space to anyone. LACCD is using the City as a ‘municipal entity front’ to hand a no-bid lease to a bunch of private corporations,” said Daniel Wright, another attorney representing the taxpayers. “The lease arrangement is a sham to circumvent the requirement for competitive bidding in the Education Code.”
The campus, located in the Northeast Los Angeles at the intersection of San Fernando Road and Fletcher Drive, is already the subject of a lawsuit for the LACCD's failure to do any environmental review required by the California Environmental Quality Act when District officials decided they wanted to change the use of the site from a Satellite Community College campus to a profit-making tenant-based facility. E-mails show LACCD’s own environmental consultant told District officials that a Supplemental Environmental Impact Report was required before implementing the changes. This advice was ignored as Trustees Scott-Hayes, Field, and Mercer led the rest of the Board down a path of illegal actions including the mis-expenditure of millions and millions of taxpayer bond funds. The Los Angeles County Superior Court has set a hearing to promptly move the case to trial on the merits.
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For more information:
Paul Heidenreich (310) 545-5459
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