School board holds off on Le Bard sale outline vote

Though they were scheduled to vote on the first version of a contract to sell the closed Le Bard Elementary School lands to the city of Huntington Beach Thursday morning, board members instead tabled discussion and decided to keep negotiating in private.

District staff had released a preliminary agreement to the public as part of the meeting agenda, but board members called that a mistake and said they hadn’t even discussed its terms until that day.

With only three board members out of five in attendance, they voted to hold off on any public discussion of the closed school site.

“The current draft of the [agreement] was not intended to be public,” Board President Celia Jaffe said. “The board did not have the opportunity to discuss details with negotiators before today. Due to that fact and the fact that we are incomplete, and we have not done some of our due diligence on the property yet, we are looking to potentially table this discussion today.”

The vote was unanimous, 3-0, with members Shirley Carey and Rosemary Saylor absent from the special morning meeting.

While the agreement may have been accidentally released, it did shed light on the outlines of a potential deal. According to that draft of the agreement, the city would buy the site for $7 million, 3.5 acres of unused land near the Huntington Beach Generating Station power plant, and $400,000 in clean-up money for the city’s parcel of land.

“We’ve made some progress,” Board President Celia Jaffe said. “But there’s definitely more to negotiate.”

The Le Bard site currently holds the district’s offices, including the board’s meeting location. But its playing fields are used by youth programs like the Seaview Little League, whose members have come out in force at public meetings to ask that their fields be preserved.

The city land would be offered as a way for the district to move its bus maintenance headquarters off of the grounds of Dwyer Middle School, or possibly as a site for a new district office, officials said.

MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at michael.alexander@latimes.com.