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The Toughest Job in LA: Fighting for Control of the DWP |
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Written by Ron Kaye
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Thursday, 22 April 2010 08:24 |
 The battle control of the Department of Water is under way with the future of top managers on the line over plans for green energy and sharply higher utility rates.
Signaling his intention to shake up the DWP, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has sent top gun Austin Beutner to lead his campaign to "deconstruct" utility operations and bring in a leadership team to replace top managers who he accuses of defying his orders.
Talking to LA Times editors and reporters on Wednesday, the mayor said that despite his authority to appoint the DWP Commission members and the DWP general manager, top supervisors who "control the bureaucracy" have stood in the way of his efforts to rapidly expand solar and wind power resources and create transparency in what he has called a "secretive" department.
"For four years, I've battled a bureaucracy that just won't respond to the policy direction," Villaraigosa said. "It's been an absolute war. Getting through that Byzantine bureaucracy is very difficult
. We've got to figure out a way to make that agency more transparent.
"They undermined [former General Manager Ronald] Deaton, they undermined [former General Manager David] Nahai. Even [outgoing General Manager S. David] Freeman. I'm talking about that upper-level management
. You can't fire them. They just go back to the Civil Service system" and they lose about $15,000 in salary as well as their city-provided cars, but they stay in the DWP. They out-wait you. They've out-waited everybody."
Villaraigosa, who is closely allied with IBEW union leader Brian D'Arcy and has approved massive pay raises sought by the union, offered softer criticism of the union's role in what's wrong with the DWP, saying it "is both part of the problem and part of the
solution" since it represents more than 90 percent of all DWP employees, including many high-level managers.
The
problem is that "it's too wall to wall...the biggest problem is that you
have people at the highest levels who are in the union
. They're the
biggest defenders of the status quo."
On Monday, Villaraigosa appointed his jobs czar, financier Austin Beute, to
replace Freeman as interim DWP manager. On Tuesday, the DWP Commission unanimously approved Villaraigosa's
appointment of the dollar-a-year deputy mayor who continue in an extraordinary dual role as the point man in charge of nearly a dozen revenue-generating departments and economic development.
Beutner was interviewed Wednesday by Warren Olney on KCRW's Which Way LA? (the interview is 27.45 minutes into the podcast) and used considerably softer language than the mayor and avoided specifics.
He made it clear that his goals are to get the DWP in order so he can hire an experienced utility executive to take charge permanently and build a political consiensus to be able to get increases in water and power rates to rebuild deteriorating infrastructure and replace coal plants -- accounting for nearly half of DWP's electricity -- with wind and solar energy.
"it's going to cost money," Beutner told Olney.
"My first and foremost challenge is to make the department more transparent...at the same time we do have to share with all of our constituents, not just with elected officials but with the people who pay the rates, just what this transition (from coal to renewable energy) will cost over a period of months weeks and years.
"If that means higher rates, people will know where that comes from...It won't be cheap but people have to understand why."
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Last Updated on Friday, 23 April 2010 08:19 |
