By A.C. Thompson

At the corner of 25th Avenue and Vicente Street in the Sunset District is a dirt lot ringed by a six-foot chain-link fence. It's empty aside from a dozen steel I beams, a pallet of lumber, and a few oxidizing hunks of metal pipe. One day – perhaps if all the stars align properly – Dianne Feinstein Elementary School will stand here.

At this point, though, Feinstein Elementary, which was supposed to have been finished in 2000, is more than five years behind schedule. During that epochal lag time the school's estimated cost has nearly doubled, billowing from $7.7 million to $14.2 million.

Much of the blame for the Feinstein boondoggle can be attributed to factors beyond the control of the San Francisco Unified School District (particularly the current administration), stalled as the project was by NIMBYs, lawsuits, and an empty piggy bank. Nonetheless, the project doesn't inspire confidence in how the district currently conducts business with the private sector.

Longtime Board of Education member Jill Wynns put a positive spin on the situation, telling the Bay Guardian the school will be of a "better quality than the one we originally planned."

Fellow board member Eric Mar wasn't so sanguine: "We should build the school but not with this ballooning contract."

Into the time machine

The saga stretches back to the late 1990s and the corruption-plagued administration of Waldemar "Bill" Rojas, who was then superintendent of schools, with education officials hiring architects in October 1997 to begin drawing up blueprints for the new facility. At the time the district was planning on a "construction cost of $7,700,000," which would be "adjusted downward" based on "the amount of asbestos and lead abatement work required," according to district documents we obtained.

Most of the bill was to be covered by a $90 million local school-building bond measure passed by voters that year. Ever the salesperson, Rojas promised to bring Feinstein Elementary and the other new facilities online ASAP, telling the San Francisco Chronicle the schools "will take two years to build."

But oh how things change. For starters, the bonds that were supposed to pay for the place got caught up in a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 1997 election, which also included a controversial measure funding a 49ers football stadium. That meant they couldn't be issued until December 1998.

Then, according to Wynns, when the bonds were finally sold and the money was available, the state ran out of matching funds, leaving the district without enough cash to finish the school. "The state's school building department went broke," she recalled.

Next came the interminable neighborhood meetings and vitriolic NIMBY squabbles, a staple of San Francisco's über-contentious development process. Some locals got particularly upset about a plan for the site that included subsidized housing for teachers, forcing a major revision of the blueprints. Then a group of neighborhood preservationists who wanted Parkside Elementary renovated – rather than flattened, rebuilt from scratch, and rechristened – threatened to sue to halt the project.

As the project languished, Wynns noted, "all of our costs have gone up.... Is this the way schools are built? Yes. Is it the way schools should be built? Probably not."

Tweaking for dollars

But beyond this amalgam of unavoidable factors, there's some reason for concern about how the district handles its contracts. The company orchestrating the whole project, a San Francisco-based design house called Kwong Kolm Architects and Interiors, or K2A, has had its contract tweaked nine times, sending the firm's paycheck soaring from $665,000 to $1,523,773.

While no one is saying the company is doing anything unethical or illegal, the entire process just looks sketchy. For one thing, the crafty use of "change orders" – industry jargon for contract revisions – is a classic way for companies to outmaneuver each other: you beat out the rival firms by putting in an unrealistically low bid then pump up your earnings through change orders.

Kwong Kolm's most recent tweaking occurred in late June when the school board agreed to give the firm another $203,143. More than $23,000 of that was for work green-lighted by district bureaucrats in 1999 but "not presented to the board for approval," according to district documents. By law, large transactions of that sort require the OK of the board, which is supposed to act as the district's fiscal overseer.

The facilities department was responsible for the questionable $23,000 expenditure back in 1999. At that juncture the department was helmed by Tim Tronson, a Rojas crony who's since been indicted for allegedly masterminding a $1 million embezzlement scheme involving another outside contractor, North Carolina-based SRS Energy. While SRS has agreed to pay some $44 million to settle civil and criminal charges against it, Tronson has pleaded not guilty and has yet to go to trial; allegedly a key element of the scam was the use of bogus change orders.

But the questions about district construction projects aren't limited to what Tronson may or may not have done years ago, nor do they center solely on Feinstein Elementary and its turbulent prehistory. Contracts are ballooning all over the district, according to an analysis of recent business deals compiled by Duane Reno, a lawyer for the city's unionized architects. By Reno's calculations, the district has approved change orders to existing contracts at least 10 times since last November, modifications that total more than $380,000.

"In some cases the district appears to be paying more than it should," he told us.

Reno certainly has an agenda, since the engineers and architects he represents feel the district should be using civil servants to come up with blueprints instead of outsourcing to private sector architects. But he may have a point.

When state auditors pored over the district's books in 2000, they highlighted the tendency of district officials to endlessly revise – that is, tack more money onto – contracts with outside companies and consultants, noting that "there seem to be questionable practices in this area."

Some school board members are concerned about the pattern. "The question is, When people keep doing change orders, are we getting a good deal?" board member Mark Sanchez said. "I've seen a lot of these contracts get changed for a lot of money."

If you ask City Attorney Dennis Herrera, he'll tell you taxpayers have gotten screwed big time by change orders in the not-so-distant past. Herrera claims construction leviathan Tutor-Saliba used countless modifications to its contract to erect the international terminal at SFO airport to overbill the city to the tune of $30 million. Herrera and his deputies are dueling with the firm in federal court in an attempt to recover the money.

Contacted by phone, Henry Kwong of Kwong Kolm declined to comment on the matter.

The district e-mailed us written responses to our questions. "There is no need for the Public to be concerned over the escalations in the design cost for the Dianne Feinstein project," spokesperson Melissa Mooney wrote. Costs bulged, she wrote, because the original, cheaper design "fell short of providing the district the building they needed" and because of a surge in steel prices and a hike in wages in the construction industry. She also pointed out that the municipal architects never bid on the Feinstein job.

State of conflict

California's Byzantine school construction rules are another unavoidable reason the price tag on Feinstein Elementary is surging – and all the school board members we interviewed weren't happy about it. State rules link architectural fees to the overall cost of a new school, so as the overall construction estimate for the facility has grown, the district has been required to pay Kwong Kolm more.

The arrangement practically screams conflict of interest since architects can, at least hypothetically, take home more dough by insisting on more expensive building materials and techniques. As Sanchez put it, "that, on the face of it, is absurd."

Conversely, if the complexity of a project increases, designers shouldn't get stuck doing twice as much work for the same amount of money. Whatever the case, Mooney pointed out that "all change orders are approved by the Board before implementation."

Despite the monumental hassles that have beset Feinstein Elementary, Wynns is trying to stay positive. "We're lucky to get a building at all," she said, adding that Sacramento has actually agreed to kick in some $11 million, far more state money than originally planned, which is good for the district.

Of course, that may just mean that some other school in some other town won't be built.

E-mail A.C. Thompson at ac_thompson@sfbg.com.