The DWP's King
Seeking conservation tips at David Nahai’s $4.6 million Benedict Canyon mansion with seven bathrooms
What a perfect William Mulholland day – searing hot and dry enough to fuel the near-hallucinatory fervor and deceptive powers of public officials trying to sell a controversial policy. On this day, at the Japanese Garden in Van Nuys, Mayor V gathers his entourage to talk up the latest grand plan for water supremacy. With the sour smell of a nearby sewage treatment baking in everyone’s nostrils, Mayor V calls to the podium the modern-day Mulholland, a.k.a. David Nahai, the top dog at the Department of Water and Power, to explain how we can conserve enough water and recycle enough crappy water to somehow fill the taps of the gazillions more headed to our desert paradise over the next few decades.
I can’t help but wonder whether Nahai might be willing to sacrifice any part of his share of the California Dream so that others can drink. But I will have to wait to find out later.
Sweat beads on Nahai’s glacial forehead as he talks up his goals to retain L.A.’s water might by using top technologies that would bring us current with Australia and Singapore and even Orange County. It all sounds ingenious and probably more realistic than my idea to order people to drink from their swimming pools and turn golf courses into orange groves before the water runs out. We should all be open-minded to the idea of replenishing our aquifers with treated bathroom water; instead of the inaccurate slogan toilet-to-tap that helped defeat a similar plan seven years ago, think of this as the Save the Aquifers campaign. The treated water is further cleansed by the earth’s natural filters before it flows to your tap. It’s nowhere near as scary as the alphabet soup of chemicals that have seeped into groundwater supplies since the advent of the industrial and space ages in Southern California. If we can cleanse trichloroethylene from the water supply, we can remove bacterial demons from sewage water.
If only Mulholland could be here today. He would be proud of the latest water wizard to take the controls of the DWP. Yet aside from their acute knowledge of water works, these two water masters would have little in common. Their styles are as different as a rain forest is from a volcano. The coarse Irishman who talked the people of Owens Valley out of their water rights has been replaced a century later by a man with a gift of refined speech. Born in Iran and educated in London, the King of Water talks with a patrician accent and blends words better than anyone in public office in L.A.
“We should not be deterred or defeated by demagoguery or ignorance,” he says. “We should not allow ourselves to fall prey to catchy, facile phrases. This is serious business. We will be mounting a very extensive communications campaign with the people of Los Angeles in order to tell them the facts.”
Like all good politicians, Nahai can keep the truth from percolating out when he thinks it’s in his best interests to do so.
As he speaks, I try to imagine what the King of Water’s own conservation measures might be at home. Does he have low-flow toilets? Does he abide by the five-minute shower rule? Do succulents fill his garden? Does he rush out to fix leaking faucets before they produce enough water to fill a reservoir?
When asked if his deeds back up his words, Nahai says, “We could do better. We’re a family of five. We try to conserve and I think we’re doing better. I try to enforce in my family an ethic of water conservation.”
Certainly he must have a yard full of succulents, right? “I like desert plants. At some point, when I get back to gardening, I’d like to replant my garden with all California native plants.”
At this point, I’m starting to picture a den of water licentiousness, with an outdoor mister running 24/7 to keep alive a jungle of ferns, epiphytes and equatorial vines.
Oh, come on, how much is your water bill every month?
“I don’t know,” he said. “You’d have to ask my wife.”
I made sure I heard him correctly and took his words as an open invitation to visit the Nahai residence and see for myself how the King of Water uses the most precious resource.
I found his address and was soon soaring over his modern Mediterranean-style palace high up in Benedict Canyon via Google Earth. It’s a nice spread, big enough to house a legion of the newcomers he says are headed our way in the next 20 years. OK, it’s massive – 6,012 square feet, with six bedrooms and seven bathrooms. Set on a narrow lot, with homes sandwiched in close on both sides, the property stretches back a third of an acre. From the air, it looks like a large swimming pool is within a few steps of a stone patio.
Maybe this is just the sort of abode a water visionary should have in 21st Century Los Angeles, where smart planners must consider each raindrop to be the last, and the odds of an abundant sierra snowpack next winter to be as long as the straggler in the ninth race at Santa Anita. How 19th Century of me to think that it might take an ascetic to lead us to conservation or that someone must renounce the profligate ways of the California Dream to chart a more responsible course.
I set out for a visit to this mountainside laboratory of water science. Maybe I could learn some water-saving gardening tips. The King of Water’s mansion is three or four miles north of Sunset in Benedict Canyon. The most striking architectural feature is the three-car garage, a design flaw that can be blamed on our sick love affair with the automobile as much as a necessity dictated by the cramped street frontage. Off to the side of the tile driveway is a staircase leading up to the double front doors.
Several ficus trees shroud the house valued at $4.6 million by zillow.com. A handful of white Iceberg roses and bougainvillea fill the narrow planting area next to the street. Boring, but not abysmal choices. But dude, toss the tired, water-sucking Ficus benjaminas that look so sad on your front porch. Some stately Euphorbia ingens or Aloe bainesii – or my favorite, Pachypodium lamerii from Madagascar – would save water and be more in keeping with a man of cultivated tastes.
I ring the doorbell and the water king’s son comes to the door. Standing on the second step of a nearby staircase is Gina Nahai, the water king’s wife and best-selling author, most recently of Caspian Rain last year. I find them delightful people who shouldn’t have to deal with the prying questions of an obnoxious columnist invading their private space. I apologize profusely for barging in on them with my mundane request to inspect their water bill. I try to blame the water king for setting me on this little treasure hunt, but Gina sets me straight. “Did you tell David you were coming here? It would have been a good idea to do so.”
They promised that the water king would call me back when he got home that night. But he never called. Instead, I heard from the public affairs department at the DWP. To make a long story short, I ended up sending in a public records request for the past year’s worth of water and electric bills for the water king and his wife.
If the bimonthly water and electric bill for a family home is $120, I’m figuring Nahai’s is close to $1,000 or more. Let’s see what he’s willing to do without before he asks the rest of Los Angeles to give something in return.
And, what about Brian D’Arcy, the union boss who gets away with calling many of the shots at the giant utility? Is he willing to conserve water in the name of the higher good?
Back at the press conference in Van Nuys, I asked one final question of the King of Water David Nahai: Do you have any idea what kind of garden Brian D’Arcy has at his house?
“I don’t,” responds the water king. “Call him up and ask him.”
Now that sounds like a challenge.
Send insults and ammo to BigAl@lasniper.com.
Published: 05/21/2008
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Comments
Dear Editor,
I am confused about the article on DWP's Nahai. What exactly did he do wrong? Why do you mock him with the title of "king"? What is an appropriate size for the house of a DWP Manager? What did he do to deserve being harassed? What about his wife and daughter? Did they do something wrong?
Or are you just being unfair?
Ammo for Big Al....
How about a truely new fresh water Source of a million acre feet a year for CA. ... Is that explosive enough ?
That amount of water would solve most of CA's water dilemmas including power generation from existing facilities. Isn't that what DWP is supposed to manage...water & power ?
Development of the Source will not damage existing water rights or the environment and it is legally available as well as economically feasible.
The real fire power of this one is the fact that for years, no water provider in CA has ever risked one key stroke to communicate, let alone investigate such a vast natural resource !
1,000,000 acre feet a year beats attacking a few pretty flowers...
WaterSource waterrdw@yahoo.com