The mayor has a lot of nerve blaming “people at the
highest levels” of DWP management of being “the biggest defenders of
the
status quo,” of failing to respond to the policy direction,” of being engaged in “an absolute war” against his leadership.
Year after year, this mayor and previous mayors, this City Council and previous ones have used the DWP as a cash cow of cover up their gross mismanagement of the city and its finances.
They politicized every policy decision, appointed nine general managers in 10 years who lacked the experience or ability to run the largest municipal utility in America, demanded they carry out political agendas without regard to the interests of the residents and businesses, without regard to the need to modernize the infrastructure.
They have failed to carry out comprehensive strategies to reduce reliance on fossil fuels or to achieve moderation in consumption of water and power.
They have turned the citizen watchdogs who are supposed to serve as an independent buffer between politicians and bureaucrats into stooge commissions, corrupting the intent the City Charter.
At every juncture, they have given into blackmail, rewarding IBEW union bully Brian D’Arcy with spectacular contracts, featherbedding and law work rules. They have taken millions of dollars of his union’s money for their campaigns and quaked at his threats
D’Arcy takes umbrage at the mayor suggesting his union is “part of the problem and part of the solution, saying he is “shocked and disappointed” at the mayor’s “failing to take responsibility for his own actions” in running the DWP.
But so what?
The mayor and his latest unqualified DWP general manager Austin Beutner already have taken any question of wage concessions from D’Arcy off the table even as they develop phony plans for green energy and fake their commitment to transparency when all they want is billions of dollars more in higher rates from the public to add thousands of new jobs to the IBEW rolls and enrich green-washer environmentalists and green investors with insider connections.
The only statement with even an ounce of truth in it that has come out of the mayor’s circle was fired GM David Nahai’s retort to D’Arcy’s pointing the finger of blame at the succession of DWP bosses:
“If Mr. D’Arcy truly wants to uncover the cause of the present problems at the DWP, a good, long look in the mirror might help,” Nahai said.
The whole truth is they all need to look in the mirror.
Everyone in power over the last decade or long kept rates low by relying on dirty coal for half the city’s power so they could afford the soaring IBEW salaries and benefits and declare as surplus electricity revenue 5, 6, 7, now 8 percent of it to keep the city general solvent.
Understand, the city already gets $300 million from the 10 percent utility tax on power and now Antonio is counting on more than $250 million extra from the “power surplus” next year, $37 million more than the DWP is supposed to supply this year if it turns over the $73.5 million that is being held hostage to force the Council to approve a rate hike.
The general fund gets 12.5 percent of all its revenue from your electricity payments to DWP, money that is used to pay the salaries and benefits of other city workers who account for 80 percent of the basic costs of city government.
Don’t kid yourself, the mayor and Council talked about 4,000 layoffs and sweetened pensions for 2,400 other city workers but in the end only 103 employees have even received pink slips and a total of 750 are targeted in the mayor’s 2010-11 budget for layoff or transfer. incentivized early retirement
All that talk was phony because all they have ever been concerned about is protecting city workers’ jobs, not public services. Every one of the hundreds of workers transferred already to special funds, the harbor, airport and DWP already are providing services to the public — not police or fire or library or parks or planning or code enforcement or any other core services.
City Hall has become a jobs program, not a services provider.
If there was any doubt just look at how the mayor has ceded so much of his authority to “jobs czar” Austin Beutner whose stated mission — when you translate his slick pronouncements lacking in specificity — is to protect and create city jobs and buy whatever jobs he can in the private sector whether they are in sweatshops or the low-wage service industry.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, here are some of Beutner’s recent pronouncements:
“What people don’t realize is that at the DWP, labor is only 25 percent
of its cost. And, they do a good job in their work. What
I want to do is look at the other three-quarters of the agency and make
sure costs are in line. People have made labor the issue and I don’t
think it’s the top issue facing the agency.”
“What I want to do is make sure the mayor, the commission and the City
council area all sharing the same information and make sure we avoid
falling in to the same sort of trap.
What I have started to do
and hope to do is look at all the information we have about the DWP and
see what we can do to restore trust.”
He admits they can’t hire a professional utility manager because they have made such a mess of the DWP, yet he wants to get rid of or demote the best professionals the DWP has, create more DWP jobs, be just transparent enough to get the Council to go along, as they just did deceitfully in approving a 5 percent rate hike permanently, with one rate hike after another.
The problem is bigger than just cutting deals with business, labor and the Council to shove rate hikes down people’s throats and make them subsidize the bills of hundreds of thousands of other customers.
The DWP must come clean about everything.
The year-old and almost totally ignored study by PA Consulting, the same firm that just sabotaged the mayor’s 20 to 30 percent rate hike, is a blueprint for all that’s wrong with the DWP.
Wages and benefit costs must be brought in line with that of private utilities and the same efficiency must be achieved. Costs and rates need to be made clear. We need to know who’s really paying the bills and who is not.
When the DWP is totally transparent and property oversight put in place, when plans for fixing the infrastructure and investing in green technology are thoroughly and publicly analyzed, when providing of water and power services and not jobs and subsidizee economic development are the strategic goals, then we can talk about how much and how fast we can spend our money to fix what they have broken.
Anything less is just another ripoff of the public by a rogue agency.