LOS ANGELES - In the shadow of the reinvigorated downtown skyline, with its new Roman Catholic cathedral and soon-to-open Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Belmont Learning Center sits half-finished, surrounded by chain-link fences and barbed wire.

Over the last seven years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has spent $175 million trying to make this high school complex a reality, but mismanagement, environmental and seismic issues as well as plain old bad luck turned the facility into a big white elephant.

But recently, the project -- the most costly school building project in the state, if not the country -- got another chance when the school board voted 4-3 to accept a revised plan for the site, which will add another $111 million to the cost.

"We had to do something with that property, and the kids need a school," said Jose Huizar, the school board member who represents the area and who promoted the plan. "We have 35 acres sitting idle in one of our most overcrowded areas for schools."

Nearly 3,000 high school students are bused out of the area each day, he said, traveling for up to two hours each way to schools in the San Fernando Valley. The area has a drop-out rate of more than 50 percent, and busing is said to be a main reason.

With the price now at $286 million, Huizar and others supporters, including Superintendent Roy Romer and Mayor James K. Hahn, focus on the cost of not following through on the project: the time that would be spent finding a new site for the high school, the price of buying more property and the probable costs of moving existing homes and businesses from what would likely be a highly developed area.

Not everyone is convinced the school's future is secure.

"I still think the issues of price and safety and litigation are as strong as before," said David Tokofsky, a school board member who voted against the proposal.

The complex, which sits on an old oil field, was abandoned about three years after it was started in 1997. Concerns had been raised about methane gas, hydrogen sulfide and other pollutants under the site. The gases can be dangerous if allowed to build up. The revelations of environmental problems at the site and the failure to disclose them led to personnel changes in the district and lawsuits between the district and its law firm and a developer.

After a two-year investigation, Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley reported this year that the project was "a public works disaster of biblical proportions," but he filed no charges alleging criminal wrongdoing.

Since taking the superintendent job three years ago, Romer, a former Colorado governor, has made reviving the project a priority.

"Before I got here they'd spent $170 million," Romer said. "To this city it became a symbol of failure. I felt if we were going to make this a very good system I had to get rid of the memory of that."

He also needed the seats for students. But Romer learned quickly about the pitfalls of the project.

After the project got going again, environmental studies revealed last year that a fault line ran down a portion of the half-finished complex. By law, building is not allowed within 50 feet of an active fault line; it could not be determined whether the fault was active.

The project again seemed doomed.

But in recent months three new options were presented for the center. Romer backed building a school for 1,500 students atop bedrock on a smaller, 14-acre site within the complex.

Most recently a plan emerged that combined aspects of the others and incorporated a 10- to 12-acre park in the campus, which would accommodate 2,600 students. Under the plan, known as Vista Hermosa, or Beautiful View, and approved May 22 by the school board, the buildings too near the fault line will be demolished. The remaining buildings will be completed and two new structures built: a 500-seat academy and a student union with an auditorium, library and cafeteria.

"We're over the hill," Romer said, echoing an exclamation he made just over a year ago as the project was resurrected and the district began focusing on ways to mitigate the toxic gases. "We're going to get this done."

But Tokofsky said he remains concerned about the lack of concrete information surrounding the plan.

"It's just a beautiful drawing," he said.

For parents and grandparents and students, however, it seemed like a major step in the right direction.

"We've felt the death of Belmont so many times; I didn't feel the system was listening to us," Gloria Soto, a longtime advocate for building the school, said. "Yesterday I felt not only did they listen but they followed through. I'm still pinching myself."