In the classic Broadway musical “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying” our hero’s handbook counsels that if something goes wrong with their easily found executive responsibilities they should immediately “blame someone else.” Recent hagiographies concerning one Larry Rasmussen makes one wonder if he is being beatified in preparation for crucifixion by the Hart Board.
Separate reports in the Signal and KHTS quoted Board Members Paul Strickland and Gloria Mercado-Fortine who painted a hagiography of Larry Rasmussen as a reincarnated St. George come to slay our school construction dragons, but are they also setting him up for the blame when the school does not open in the fall of 2013, a mere three years away. (The KHTS piece also obliquely makes a strange claim that the school stimulus will resolve our macroeconomic difficulties as well.)
As someone with a bit of experience in construction matters, projects of any scope and complexity always take longer to complete than the original timelines. (They also almost always cost more than originally projected.) This is not due to venality, fraud or incompetence but to external factors over which the developer can exercise little or no control. For example, an approval expected at the June meeting of a Regional Planning Commission gets tabled for one piece of information and cannot be taken up until the next meeting in September after the summer break. Extremely harsh rains result in a three week delay in grading. Or, perish the thought, adjoining homeowners obtain an injunction to stop building pending resolution of their claims that stays in place for six months and then an additional six weeks because the issuing judge is on a “once in a lifetime” European vacation. These small and unintended delays cumulate to amount to some real turns of the calendar.
So, more realistically, it will probably be five to seven years before the “legacy” Foothill League Schools (particularly Valencia) get to travel to Romero Canyon to put the humiliating beat down on the nascent Castaic sports teams. But the Hart Board will not care. They will just (unfairly) blame St. Larry, who has by that time “fallen” from grace
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