SACRAMENTO, CA - Last week the Belmont Learning Center in Los Angeles, the most expensive high school in history with $175 million already spent, grew $111 million more expensive. While a disaster for students, the now $286 million "Belmonster," as some call it, provides clear lessons about what is wrong with California's government education system.

Los Angeles could have eased overcrowding by converting administrative facilities to classrooms. They opted instead to build Belmont, a high-school for 5,000 students, a shopping mall, and 120 apartments. The grandiose project raised expectations and proved difficult to oppose, even with a $200 million price tag.

Some of the same people involved in fielding bids then moved to the other side of the table to work on the project. The winning bid came from a firm with connections in the district. But in 1998, a year after breaking ground, a report indicated serious environmental problems on the site, including seepage of methane gas. The report got buried but the dangers could not be long ignored.

In January 2000, the Los Angeles Board of education voted to kill the project, which had then consumed more than $123 million without serving a single student. It now stands partly wrapped in plywood and plastic, a monument to waste and ineptitude visible from the Harbor Freeway. But current LA schools superintendent Roy Romer, former governor of Colorado, wants to revive the project.

On May 22, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted 4-3 to plow another $111 million into the Belmont Learning Center. The new plan includes a park but no apartments or retail space. The revamped school will serve 2,600 students, just over half the original estimate. And yet the cost has increased to more than a quarter billion dollars. Based on past experience, the actual cost will be even higher.

Romer claims Belmont will be finished in 2007, a full decade after it began. It is symbolic of a system that exploits students and equates spending with quality. When the spending fails, the typical cure is to spend even more. Things will always cost as much as possible and take longer than originally projected. If finished at all, the facilities deliver less than promised. That is because buildings and students play a secondary role.

The system works best as a means for the redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to educational bureaucrats and their cronies. For them, Belmont is a raging success. Many took the money and ran. As far as can be discerned, not a single district employee was fired, though several have been suspended for a year - with pay, of course.

This is how things work in the government education monopoly, which thrives on waste, facilitates corruption, cheats those it claims to serve, and ultimately harms the entire state. As PRI will show in an upcoming study, there are better and cheaper ways to procure school facilities. But until people are free to leave the government system, little will change and more Belmonsters will stalk California.