Power Games at DWP
David Nahai must be fuming about the spineless tightwads on the L.A. City Council this week. The new general manager of the Department of Water and Power encountered rough political waters when he tried to win support for rate increases he believes are needed to keep the air conditioners running this summer. We hope even bigger headaches await him before he finds some relief in higher rates.
The council delayed its vote for a week, which sounds like a tiny problem, but it’s not. Nahai’s been talking up the water and electrical rates increase for nearly six months, first as the head of the DWP’s board of directors, then as a nominee last December for the top job, and now as the guy who will be held responsible when the lights go out this summer.
He’s jumped through all the council’s hoops, and keeps finding new ones placed in his way. During his confirmation hearing before the City Council’s Energy and Environment Committee last December, Nahai pledged to set up an oversight committee to show the public how the new money would be spent. The committee liked what it heard, or so it seemed at the time. If councilmembers objected, they should have sent Nahai packing. The rate increases – 8.5 percent for electricity and 6.2 percent for water – would be phased in by July 2009.
In retrospect, Nahai, who got the top job because he was billed as a reformer who could shake up the utility’s insular and sometimes trouble-prone culture, should have negotiated the increases as a condition for taking the general manager’s job. After all, he doesn’t think he can do the job without them. And what’s the real reason for the delay? The City Council doesn’t know anything of great substance now about the proposal that it didn’t know six months ago, or that it is likely to learn by next week. Of course, the council does know how much it hates being yelled at by neighborhood groups that oppose the increases, particularly with elections coming up next year.
We don’t want Nahai to get a free ride. Now that the City Council has his attention, it should make even more demands of him. If he is so committed to openness and allowing the public a full view of the utility’s operations, let’s see the council force open the books showing how more than a $1 million given every year to DWP’s union-run training institutes is spent. It’s public money given to a public utility. The public should see the books.
Let’s just see who the council fears most: the neighborhood groups or Brian D’Arcy’s International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18.
Published: 03/26/2008
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