School Work Needing Supervision

The public tab continues to run in the bizarre Hunters Point school renovation fiasco.

The fracas pits state Sen. Quentin Kopp and the tax vigilantes against San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Waldemar Rojas and Charlie Walker, a builder and Hunters Point activist. A month ago, the school district was about to pay Walker $250,000 to settle his claim for construction work he apparently did at the behest of Rojas. That's when Kopp and the San Francisco Taxpayers Association ran to court with a lawsuit to stop the whole thing. So, add legal fees to what has become a financial disaster of the first order, a situation loaded with enough politics to make the real issue virtually disappear from anyone's radar.

The controversy thus far has focused on whether or not the school district should fork out $250,000 to pay contractors who many people believe performed unauthorized work. Superintendent Rojas admits that he personally approved such work without sending the contractors through normal bidding procedures. But he contends he was filling a procedural vacuum during an emergency.

However the courtroom antics, political maneuvering, and internecine duplicity play themselves out, though, the bigger concern is the health and safety of 260 children.

This whole ordeal began a few months back, while more than half of the school board was campaigning for election or re-election. An angry, vocal group of Bayview/Hunters Point parents came to the Aug. 13 school board meeting with concerns about asbestos and lead toxicity at Gloria R. Davis Academic Middle School. The district had been doing repair and rehabilitation work on the school all summer, during which time asbestos-laden material was uncovered behind a wall and removed.

Also on hand was Walker, a construction work broker (more on that in a moment) with an activist streak and a history of arriving at such public events with an organized group of generally angry people. This day was no exception. And it was clearly not the kind of event school board members wanted to see three months before an election.

Rojas agreed to meet with the parents, community members, and representatives of the NAACP, Black Leadership Forum, and Black Men in Action at the school site two days later, on Aug. 15, with the intention of reassuring folks that the site would be ready for the beginning of school on Aug. 28. The district's facilities and planning staff, he says, had assured him that this would be the case.

Problem was, Rojas was quickly forced to agree with protesters that the school was not ready for children. Not only was it imminently clear that the cafeteria and gymnasium would not be completed before the beginning of the fall term, but new asbestos and safety concerns had arisen with the additional construction. Department of Public Health officials later confirmed that the school was not safe. Yet, had it not been for the parent and community uproar, the district would have sent 260 children into that unfinished, unsafe building on the first day of school Aug. 28.

The scramble began.
The school board held an emergency meeting on Sunday, Aug. 18, three days after the visit, and effectively postponed the first day of school, pending success in finding a new home for students. Community members, including Walker, suggested that portable classrooms be placed on land at Hayden Street and Whitney Young Circle, near the existing school, owned by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

Everyone was in trouble. Rojas was catching hell from the parents. School district staff were catching hell from Rojas. And the school board was catching hell from a neighborhood reluctant to trust anyone.

"This community has numerous issues," says Rojas. "They've been eating lead for years. They don't have a strong belief that they're going to be taken care of."

The first day of school came and went without the children of Gloria R. Davis Academic Middle School. Meanwhile, Walker, his business associate Jay Forni, and a growing list of subcontractors began work on the Redevelopment Agency land, which eventually included grading, excavating, and removing yet more asbestos-laden soil.

This is what would lead to the legal questions.
The district did not begin the bid process for construction until after Walker and his group had already started work on the property. And none of the players had a contract with anyone else for either the property or the construction. School district staff say that they advised Walker that a formal bid process had to occur, and on at least one occasion, told him to stop work until it had. On Aug. 28, the Redevelopment Agency obtained a cease-and-desist order against Walker and Forni, to stop work on its land. Rojas says he had a verbal OK from Redevelopment Agency Director Clifford Graves, who left on vacation shortly after this entire event began.

But Graves remembers it a little differently. "We never agreed to it. The closest we got to it was that I did have a call from the superintendent back in the summer about would we be open to making that site available, and I said, 'Yeah, we probably could.' He called back later the same day and decided they weren't going to use it after all, and that's how we left things. There was no agreement."