Editorial: AUDIT BOND USE - "Something is rotten in facilities" + ●●smf's 2¢
Daily Breeze Editorial | http://bit.ly/f7GYHV
24 November 2010 - Something is rotten in facilities. With apologies to William Shakespeare, it's the perfect way to sum up the concerns about the LAUSD department charged with spending more than $20 billion of our tax dollars to build new schools and upgrade the old ones.
And it's time that the Inspector General's Office stepped in to undertake an official audit to either confirm those suspicions, or to put them to rest before the Los Angeles Unified School District starts ramping up to spend the next bond.
There's evidence enough that contracts in the massive building department have been mishandled, both historically and currently. But whether it's a deep systemic problem or simply a few bad apples in a crate of good ones is not clear.
Last week, the school district canceled the second contract to a subcontractor in two weeks because of concerns over how the contract was awarded. In this case, the contract, for a former LAUSD executive, was for $90,000 over two months to work on a detailed plan for the district's next round of school construction funded by the $7 billion bond voters approved in 2008. The contract amount wasn't at issue. Superintendent Ramon Cortines canceled it because the district has banned subcontractors.
The week before, Cortines cancelled another contract for the same reason, this one for $3.7 million to Consilia LLC, owned by four longtime, high-paid LAUSD