How could a dog ignore a web site called LACurbed.com? I learned of this great site this morning after being struck by a Dog Trainer post about one of the silliest projects floating around this crazy city.
The project concerns a lot of green space – which I love for a variety reasons, mostly scatological.
But Curbed L.A., while its story was picked up by the Dog Trainer, has nothing to do with dog training, which was a bit of a disappointment. I’m into self-improvement.
The story – thank God! — also has nothing to do with the DWP, the mayor, the City Council, the controller or that Nuch guy – at least not yet.
The project in question is to build something like New York’s Central Park over the 101 freeway just east of the 110 in downtown Los Angeles.
According to Shelby Grad, the Dog Trainer investigative reporter who stole the story from Curbed LA:
“There are no firm design plans for the freeway cap — nor is there a firm price tag. The concepts show meandering open space and new high-rise development in and around what is now the 101. Backers are bullish, likening it to L.A.’s version of New York’s Central Park.
“Preliminary concepts say the park would likely be built as part of a public-private partnership that would involve some new high-rise construction. A community meeting on the project is scheduled for May 13 at Caltrans headquarters, according to Curbed L.A.”
Grad didn’t even steal the funniest part of the Cubed LA post:
“While we don’t know what designs are currently on the table, interns at EDAW AECOM created plans for the project in 2008 that called for a half-mile cap with ‘an iconic gateway and overlook at Grand Avenue’ that would include the tallest structure on the west coast.”
Interns? The tallest structure on the West Coast?
One of the comments on Curbed called the project “architectural masturbation,” a term I hadn’t come across before, but obviously familiar to Curb’s audience, which seem to know a lot about building things.
Another one of these things is apparently planned for the Hollywood Freeway. That idea has been kicking around for a while.
First, it’s insulting that Caltrans is spending a dime on this idiocy. But more frightening is the idea of waking up one morning to the Garcetti Skating Rink or the Lake LaBonge.
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.
From a million throats and more there rose a lusty yell; It rumbled through the Valley, it rattled in the basin; It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled out to the east, For Tony, mighty Tony, was advancing to the bat.
There was ease in Tony’s manner as he sang his song of solar power; There was Measure B upon his lips, and green in all his words,. And when, responding to the jeers, he swiftly filed suit, No voter still could doubt that greed was at the heart.
And when the votes were tallied, shouts of joy erupted in the air, As Tony stood a-watching in haughty grandeur there. His smirk of certainty faded as the shock became so clear, “That ain’t our style. Strike one,” the voters blared.
Without a hint of shame great Tony said, “So what?” And took his place at bat again and ignoring the rising tumult, ;He took a second swing with the Son of B, The frightened 15 took heed of the uproar, and said “Strike two.”
The sneer is fixed on Tony’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate; He calls on Austin for advice on how to shake the money tree,. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down their pants, We shall get all the green they got, he proudly tells his boss
Oh, somewhere in this troubled town the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; But there is no joy in City Hall — mighty Tony has struck out.
The moral of this poem, is not to be so very arrogant — Wikipedia (With apologies to Ernest Thayer)
You can tell a lot about a guy from the people he chooses as his friends — and his enemies.
The mayor counts as friends a circle that includes lobbyists, developers and big shots who are getting rich off of the public business and see opportunities to get even richer.
And there’ are people like Brian D’Arcy — the DWP union boss who thinks labor negotiations are a game of blackmail and gets spectacular union contracts and promises of thousands of more jobs from the mayor when everybody else is hurting and taking pay cuts or losing jobs.
Then, there are his enemies, enemies of his own making, people like the DWP managers he dismisses collectively as incompetent and recalcitrant without having the guts to offer specific names or do anything about them during his five years as mayor.
And City Attorney Carmen Trutanich has become Antonio’s Enemy No.1 because he poses the greatest danger as the only independent elected city official, the only one who isn’t owned by the same crowd of insider profiteers that hover around everyone else in City Hall.
The mayor’s way of dealing with Trutanich is to break his promises and gut his department by slashing his budget by more than a third this year and next.
Trutanich is no one to be messed with lightly. He fired off a letter to the mayor and put it up on his website accusing Antonio of political cynicism and “a remarkable lack of leadership and imagination” that puts “public safety and the protection of taxpayer dollars at substantial risk.”
“You have apparently lost faith in and given up on the innate ingenuity and work ethic of its residents and employees, who have suggested and implemented innovative cost-saving measures that can lead us through these challenging budgetary times. Moreover, your proposed Budget fails to recognize the core missions of the City and thereby continues to place public safety and the protection of taxpayer dollars at substantial risk.
“In short, your proposals will only exacerbate the budget crisis looming in the future and appear to be motivated by some agenda other than the continued success of all of the public safety offices in this City, including the City Attorney’s Office.”
Trutanich notes the mayor’s budget only cuts his own office’s spending by 2.6 percent 2.6% r, and “despite a so-called ‘hard hiring freeze’ for other City employees, your office continues to hire political staff.”
The impact on losing 100 more attorneys, Trutanich said, will be dramatic in terms of his ability to defend the city against $2 billion in pending liability claims and will force him to discontinue prosecuting discretionary cases involving “gang injunctions and related prosecutions; the Safer City Initiative; the Neighborhood Prosecutor Program; the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program; the Housing and Problem Properties Program; environmental and consumer protection; code or “broken window” enforcement; domestic violence prosecutions; and many other non-priorable criminal offenses.”
For a political cynic like the mayor, the decision to go to war is a big mistake, a blunder that violates the first precept in Machiavelli’s bible of political manipulation: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
The disintegration of the mayor’s political strategy is happening so fast it is hard to keep up. But the signs of his desperation are clear enough.
He dismissed the likes of Eli Broad and RIchard Riordan from the day he took office as mayor and then suddenly, as budget crisis was crashing down on him, turned to them and surrendered his authority to their guy Austin Beutner, a fabulously rich corporate takeover financier with nothing better to do since he fell off a bike and nearly killed himself.
Three months later, Beutner has become the extra-legal de facto mayor, calling the shots in nearly a dozen key departments on everything from economic development to the sale of city assets to reduce the massive budget deficits.
This week he took on yet another major job for his dollar-a-year salary as interim general manager of the Department of Water and Power, a dual role that tramples on the city charter’s intent to provide checks and balances to ensure civilian oversight on policy and prevent corruption.
Interviewed by Warren Olney on KCRW’s Which Way LA? (link to podcast, Beutner comes up at 27:45 minute mark), the 9th DWP boss in 10 years showed he was a quick study in the fine art of saying little specific but implying a great deal, thus leaving all his options open: Get a green energy plan together, be transparent enough to sell it so he can get the rate hikes the mayor wants and reduce the political tensions enough to be able to hire a professional utility manager for the first time in years.
Even as he was chatting with Olney, the mayor was praising D’Arcy as “part of the solution” and waving his enemies list in front of editors and reporters at the LA Times, defaming without naming names the DWP management as “”wall to wall…at the highest levels…the biggest defenders of the status quo.”
“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.”
The funny thing about that is Nick Patsaouras told him the same thing two years ago with the only difference being that the then DWP Commission President identified by name those who wanted to open up the books and were capable of doing a good job and those in the way.
Patsaouras got fired for his trouble and his solution, creation of a Rate Payer Advocate, was killed because transparency was the last thing the mayor wanted.
But it has reared its head and left the mayor and his allies scrambling to derail it by putting it under the control of the compliant Controller Wendy Greuel even as some members of the City Council are showing signs of getting uppity with an awakening public demanding better of them than they have seen in a long time.
Read Trutanich’s letter in full, a declaration of war between elect officials in LA that has no precedent in recent history:
CARMEN A. TRUTANICH City Attorney April 21,2010
Honorable Mayor Villaraigosa:
This letter is in response to your proposed Budget for Fiscal Year 2010/11 issued on April 20, 2010. Needless to say, I am deeply disappointed in your proposal, which displays a remarkable lack of leadership and imagination, and further demonstrates a fundamental failure of management on the part of the Mayor’s Office.
The proposed Budget is not a successful strategy to protect and promote the fiscal health and public safety of our City, and clearly fails to recognize and appreciate the basic skills necessary to efficiently manage its resources and employees. Rather than creatively and effectively managing this City, you have apparently lost faith in and given up on the innate ingenuity and work ethic of its residents and employees, who have suggested and implemented innovative cost-saving measures that can lead us through these challenging budgetary times. Moreover, your proposed Budget fails to recognize the core missions of the City and thereby continues to place public safety and the protection of taxpayer dollars at substantial risk. In short, your proposals will only exacerbate the budget crisis looming in the future and appear to be motivated by some agenda other than the continued success of all of the public safety offices in this City, including the City Attorney’s Office.
It is also obvious that your proposals cynically protect political positions at the expense of public safety and essential services. For example, I note with great dismay that the proposed Budget recommends only a 2.6% reduction for the Mayor’s Office. I also understand that, despite a so-called “hard hiring freeze” for other City employees, your office continues to hire political staff, which is not tasked to perform public safety functions. In comparison, the Office of the City Attorney, which is a designated public safety office under the City Charter, has been targeted for a reduction of 18% (or approximately $17 million), which is unprecedented for any City public safety agency and will result in the unnecessary layoff of over 100 prosecutors and support staff. Such a severe reduction to this Office constitutes an assault to public safety and a diminished capacity to protect the City’s treasury. Our City and its residents need and deserve reasoned and competent management In the effective delivery of essential services, not the wasteful protection of overtly and costly political positions proposed in your Budget.
In addition to being misleading, the proposed Budget disproportionately impacts this Office compared to other public safety offices. As you are aware, priorto the issuance of the proposed Budget, representatives of both your office and the CAO advised this Office that a 10% (or $9.3 million) reduction, which could be offset by any savings derived from anticipated furloughs, would be recommended for this Office. In addition to offsets or “credits” for any furlough savings, our Office was advised that any remaining deficit could be addressed and any layoffs avoided through cooperative or “incentivized” agreements with other departments, in which our budget would be credited by revenues collected or saved by this’ Office. Specifically, our Office provided your office with materials and inforrnation regarding several such cost-saving and revenue- generating projects, including the consolidation of the Workers’ Compensation Program and certain debt and tax collections activities within our Office, as well as the proposed Administrative Code Enforcement program. Obviously, I was surprised and shocked to see your recommendation for an 18% (or $17 million) reduction, with no credits for furloughs, for this Office. The credibility of your office has been sorely tested and damaged by this and other recent actions.
It is beyond dispute that, as required under the City Charter, the Office of the City Attorney provides and performs vital and essential and mandated public safety services and financial protection to the City and its citizens. As you know, there are three primary and core public safety agencies under the Charter: the Los Angeles Police Department; the Los Angeles Fire Department; and the City Attorney’s Office. Your proposed FY 2010/11 Budget recommends an 18% reduction in the funding for the Office of the City Attorney, which, when combined with the 16% reduction imposed during FY 2009/10, equates to a total reduction of more than 30% over two budget cycles. This is the largest reduction suffered by any public safety agency in the City and poses an unacceptable risk to public safety. On the other hand, your proposed Budget proposes a 2% reduction for LAFD and an increase of 1% for LAPD.
As a public safety agency, I believe this Office should be treated no differently than LAFD or LAPD, especially given the critical support and successful defense our Office provides to these departments each day. There is no rational basis to increase the LAPD by 1 %, while simultaneously reducing the number of prosecutors handling its cases by the proposed 18%. Without city prosecutors, persons arrested by LAPD will be released without being charged. As noted by the late Chief Daryl Gates in response to proposed budget cuts to the City Attorney’s Office in 1982, “[I]t makes no sense for the Police Department to apprehend (a criminal) and then find the prosecution cannot be completed.” (See copy of attached article in Los Angeles Times, 117/82). It should also be noted, that in 1982, then-Chief Gates publicly stated that he was prepared and committed to share resources with the City Attorney’s Office in order to accomplish the joint mission of the two departments, namely, to protect our residents from crime. To date, there has been no effort by your office or the LAPD to act in a similarly gracious partnership of true shared-sacrificed in our joint mission.
This Office has more discretion in deciding whether to file and prosecute criminal cases, as opposed to defending civil liability cases filed against the City by private parties. As such, in the event this Office suffers the proposed 18% reductions and layoffs, I will have no choice but to discontinue prosecuting those criminal matters in which I have some limited discretion. These matters include the following: gang injunctions and related prosecutions; the Safer City Initiative; the Neighborhood Prosecutor Program; the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program; the Housing and Problem Properties Program; environmental and consumer protection; code or “broken window” enforcement; domestic violence prosecutions; and many other non-priorable criminal offenses.
Under the mandate of the City Charter, this Office also serves as the guardian of the City’s treasury. Although the Mayor proposes the budget and the Council approves it, this Office aggressively defends it everyday from liability and lawsuits that seek to deplete it through frivolous and unreasonable damage claims. Every reduction in the number of deputy city attorneys defending the City against frivolous lawsuits exposes the City to potentially more millions of dollars in damages and payouts to private lawyers looking for a payday from the City’s deep pockets.
Since I took office in July 2009, our attorneys have vigorously andsuccessfully protected the City by winning 32 out of 32 civil trials – and saving theCity over $100 million in potential damage awards. Obviously, had the City been held liable at trial, the jury or the court could have ordered damages and costs significantly higher than the last pre-trial settlement offer, which could have totaled in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Although this Office has been extraordinarily successful over the past nine months, the loss of any additional attorneys will greatly diminish our ability to further protect the City’s treasury from such liability damage claims.
Moreover, additional reductions to our budget will not limit the City’s liability. Rather, such reductions will expose the City’s treasury to even more or potentially higher liability payouts. This Office does not create liability – other departments within the City engage in activities that create tens of millions of dollars of potential liability each year. Currently, our Office is defending the City against nearly $2 billion in civil liability claims, which if lost, will be paid by the taxpayers. As the City’s lawyers, we are solely responsible under the Charter to defend the City against these and other potential liabilities created by other departments. Therefore, when you reduce the budget of this Office by 18%, I cannot magically reduce the number of civil liability cases currently pending against this City by a corresponding 18% or lower the City’s potential exposure by even one dollar. Even though you may want to layoff employees of this Office who tirelessly and professionally defend this City, you cannot wish away the thousands of pending lawsuits demanding potentially billions of dollars from the taxpayers of this City. Unlike sidewalks to be fixed or trees to be trimmed, you cannot pick and choose which civil lawsuits to ignore. Each and every one of these thousands of lawsuits must be answered and defended. Losing just one of these cases, due to a lack of experienced or a sufficient number of counsel, could cost the City millions of dollars in damages and wipe out any potential savings you mistakenly and shortsightedly believe can be accomplished through further reductions to this Office.
In fact, rather than suffer the additional and punitive proposed 18% reduction, this Office must be recognized and rewarded for its tremendous success in reducing costs and eliminating its deficit during FY 2009/10. When I assumed Office on July 1, 2009, there was a deficit of over $18 million. Since that date, our employees have successfully generated savings that have reduced the deficit, which is now targeted to be entirely eliminated by the end of FY 2009/10 on June 30. We have accomplished this success through a combination of ERIP, furloughs, reductions in costs for outside counsel, vendors and litigation expenses, as well as increased subrogation collections and environmental and consumer protection penalties – and just plain hard work.
Our employees have accomplished and endured all cost-saving measuresthey have been asked to implement and will deliver a balanced budget.Unfortunately, other City departments have apparently not been able to properlymanage and balance their own budgets. Despite our success and sacrifice,however; our employees are again being asked to bear the burden of those other departments that have not been properly managed and will suffer a disproportionate share of the reductions – all to the very grave risk to publicsafety and the City treasury. Moreover, such reductions will result in even more potential liability for the City due to lack of staff necessary to defend against lawsuits or prevent such lawsuits through adequate risk management and municipal counsel.
The Office of the City Attorney and its employees clearly recognize and understand the serious and unprecedented financial challenges facing the City. Our employees have worked hard and sacrificed much over the past year to reduce costs and accomplish increasingly more with fewer resources. In fact, as you well know, I personally advised you and your staff on multiple occasions that this Office and its employees were willing and prepared to take on more responsibility, including the City’s entire Workers’ Compensation and debt/tax collections programs, in order to assist the’ City in reducing costs and generating much-needed revenue. As I stated, there is no need to contract out such work to outside vendors and contractors when we have experienced and dedicated City employees who can more efficiently handle such matters.
Our success to date in bearing our share of the burden and reducing the City’s deficit is proven and easy to measure. We have successfully performed our duties, while at the same time dramatically cutting costs and reducing staff from the General Fund. For example, this Office will reach the targeted goal of less than 750 General Fund positions well before June 30, 2010, which significantly exceeds the $8.6 million in savings requested in the Mid-Year Financial Status report issued in January 2010.
Your recommended ·18% reduction to this Office and resulting 100 layoffs will reduce our staff to an untenable 650 General Fund positions. Such a reduction will constitute a budget loss of nearly 35% and more than 200 General Fund positions in just one year. The proposed 18% reduction and layoffs will severely impair the ability of this Office to provide the public safety and fiscal protection services mandated by my authority under the Charter.
I cannot emphasize enough that we are a public safety office – protecting both the safety and health of our citizens and our City treasury. Prosecuting crimes and defending the City treasury are core missions of this City, and our Office and its prosecutors, litigators, investigators and their support staff perform these essential services in a highly professional and cost effective manner.
Accordingly, I will firmly and publicly object to your proposed disproportionate reductions and resulting layoffs that will significantly impact essential and core City services provided by this Office. I will address my concerns to the Council, where I intend to demonstrate the serious flaws in your proposed Budget. I anticipate that the Council will provide much needed guidance and direction, and eventually allocate and approve appropriate funds to. fully support the essential services provided by this Office without the need for any layoffs of prosecutors, litigators, investigators or their support staff.
Ultimately, I will take whatever actions are necessary in order to ensure that the Office of the City Attorney is able to perform its mandated role under the Charter to protect the City’s residents and its treasury. The City deserves nothing less.
In a devastating six-page letter Thursday afternoon, City Attorney Carmen Trutanich accuses Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of “a remarkable lack of leadership and imagination,that puts “public safety and the protection of taxpayer dollars at substantial risk.” Responding to the mayor’s budget proposal that cuts his spending 18 percent on top of a similar cut this year, Trutanich suggests the mayor has “lost faith” in the city’s residents and public employees and is engaging in political cynicism.
“Your proposals will only exacerbate the budget crisis looming in the future and appear to be motivated by some agenda other than the continued success of all of the public safety offices in this City, including the City Attorney’s Office.
“It is also obvious that your proposals cynically protect political positions at the expense of public safety and essential services. For example, I note with great dismay that the proposed Budget recommends only a 2.6% reduction for the Mayor’s Office. I also understand that, despite a so-called ‘hard hiring freeze’ for other City employees, your office continues to hire political staff, which is not tasked to perform public safety functions.” (READ THE WHOLE LETTER AT OURLA.ORG)
Back in 1999 at the height of the dot-com with the state treasury overflowing with money, Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa joined in a bipartisan move to share the wealth of California.
The beneficiaries were public employees and the vehicle for rewarding them was know as Senate Bill 400, a measure that started out tamely as updating the 40-year-old death benefits plan but became in the Assembly a massive enhancement to pensions for employees of the state, the schools and most local jurisdictions.
With only seven of the 120 legislators in both houses voting no, SB 400 allowed public employees to retire as young as 50 and to get pensions of up to 90 percent of their highest salaries in the case of police and firefighters, or 75 percent for civilians.
It was argued that it would save the state money in the short run and that the cost over time would be no more than $650 million a year.
Over the next two years, even as the boom was turning to bust, the City of Los Angeles got in step with the state with then Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Bernard Parks signing a ballot measure to get LA’s cops and firefighters the same pension deal — support that both have come to deeply regret
“This new funding structure is
projected to reduce the City’s General Fund contribution to the Fire and
Police Pension System by an estimated $196 million over the next five
years,” according to the ballot argument that drew no opposition. “Given current projections, the reduction in General Fund
contributions could continue for an additional five to ten years.”
And so the seeds of destruction were sown.
Today, taxpayers are putting more than $3 billion annually to keep the state pension funds able to pay their obligations with estimates of the total statewide unfunded liability to public employees running as high as $500 billion.
In LA, the payment to pension funds is eating the city budget alive at $j800 million this year and soaring potentially to more than $2 billion within a few years because of an unfunded liability of as much as $17 billion.
Just Wednesday, the governor declared public employee pension reform his No. 1 priority, saying, “”The single biggest threat to our fiscal health and California’s future
is our public pension system. I refuse to pass this crisis onto the next governor or the next
Legislature.”
For his part, Villaraigosa announced the city’s “pension system
is no longer sustainable” with benefit costs at 19% of the general fund budget and certain to rise sharply in coming years.
So what do they want to do about it?
Change the law so that new city and state workers get smaller pensions and can’t collect them until they are seven to 10 years older than current employees can.
There are no estimates available of how much these steps would reduce the burden to taxpayers but how much could it be when both the city and state are broke and not likely to be doing much hiring for years to come.
“The city and the state are legally prohibited from taking existing
benefits away from people already on the government payroll or receiving
a pension,” as the LA Times noted today.
Of course, bankruptcy — an option for the city but not the state — could make real pension reform possible, as Riordan is now advocating publicly.
But that would be political suicide for everyone in office so don’t expect your elected leaders to take such an honorable step.
Facing job eliminations and furloughs, public employee unions have shown
no inclination to negotiate new deals on pensions and lifetime health benefits.
Most of us who work or worked in the private sector didn’t have the same protections or rights. The company I worked for half my adult life closed its pension plan more than a decade ago and my wife’s employer just sent out notice her pension plan is being closed, reducing the projected payout to employees by more than half in most cases.
The disparity in wages and benefits between the public and private sectors is tearing our city and state apart. We are at loggerheads with no way out so things will have to get worse, a lot worse, before unions make concessions or a taxpayer revolt bring the situation to a moment of truth.
Services at every level of government are being cut and the cuts will grow deeper year after year because our leaders are papering over the deficits, borrowing against the future, praying for the Obama economic miracle to save us all.
This is insanity We can keep going round and round in circles talking about pension reform and doing nothing to fix it even as our city and state spiral downward into economic decline with all of its consequences. “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is how Einstein once defined insanity.
All the talk by our political leaders is nothing more than posturing. Their long-term failure as leaders has left them caught between the public’s refusal to pay more to government and the unions’ refusal to give up anything.
We can go on and on like this. We can keep on shouting the end of the world is coming unless we spend every cent we have to go green. We can keep on warning we need more cops to protect us from lawless gangs and criminals. We can keep on firing teachers and closing parks and libraries. We can keep on denouncing each other and saying “no” to every solution anyone else proposes.
Or we can come to our senses and see where this inevitably leads. It shouldn’t take catastrophe to get people whose lives and fortunes are inextricably tied together to seek the common ground but that’s the way it usually works.
UPDATE: Read Austin Beutner’s letter to DWP workers atOurLA.org.
It wouldn’t be make believe if anyone in their right mind still believed in Antonio.
He couldn’t even get more than one round of applause from his hand-picked audience of contributors at his State of the City speech, and that was for the one thing that has gone right under his watch, the reduction in violent crime. The budget plan he outlined Tuesday night is nothing but a work of fiction by a mayor so desperate to save himself he is willing to destroy his city — a compilation of wishful thinking on revenue projections and fantasies of income from fire sales of assets.
It is loaded with one-time savings and revenues that even if they materialize will only help get through the coming year’s $484 million deficit while leaving the 2011-12 deficit of $775 million and the following year’s $1 billion deficit untouched.
He must be stopped before he harms us all.
Some people learn from their mistakes, not Antonio. He got us into this mess doing exactly what he is proposing to do again: Chasing numbers downhill and using smoke and mirrors to avoid reality.
He’s probably the only man in America who still believes the Obama economic miracle will lift the city’s ship back to normal. There isn’t going to be any economic miracle. Normal isn’t coming back. Fundamental economic changes are occurring.
We can no longer use City Hall as a jobs and social welfare program, as a bottomless pit of wealth for sweetheart contracts with unions, contractors and consultants and to subsidize developers whose projects make the quality of our lives and our neighborhoods worse.
Surely, De Facto Mayor Austin Beutner understands this as well as anybody. He made his fortune buying up distressed companies on the cheap, scaling costs to revenue, focusing on the core business and then selling them for spectacular profits.
As the mayor’s top gun, he has been given direct authority over every city agency that impacts revenue and. in a move that is extra-legal, has crossed the line and handed direct control of the Department of Water and Power as its general manager.
What does that say about the pretense of separation of powers, of citizen commission’s providing oversight on politicians and bureaucrats when as the mayor’s man Beutner is part of the authority that appoints the DWP Board and as general manager he reports to the board he appoints?
Is there a secret memo somewhere in the dungeons of City Hall that says martial law was declared as part of the fiscal emergency and the rule of law suspended?
The City Council must stop this abuse of power by rejecting Beutner’s appointment or at the least force him to resign as deputy mayor for appearances sake, if nothing else.
The same is true of the mayor’s budget. The Council is as much responsible for this crisis as he is and now has one last chance to put an end to these phony money games that are rapidly moving LA down the road to oblivion and bankruptcy and made our city the laughing stock of the world.
“I understand your utility is going bankrupt and your city with it,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Beutner at an exclusive Getty Center event Monday night during a visit presumably to scout around for some bargains in public assets to pick up for 10 cents on the Euro.
David Zahniser in the LA Times all but ignores the budget in his story on the mayor’s speech by focusing on the dizzying pendulum swings in direction and message that Antonio, Controller Wendy Greuel and the Council have engaged in for the last year, from early retirements to 4,000 layoffs to today’s “not to worry, we fixed everything” sound bite.
“When the information is that confusing and that contradictory, the
public doesn’t know what to believe — except to distrust anything
they’re told,” said Westside community leader Mike Eveloff, president of the Tract 7260 Homeowners Assn.
The mayor’s handlers regard all this as nothing but a public relations exercise in need of a “more consistent message.”
Antonio himself clearly agrees, deflecting all responsibility for the crisis he created by falsely claiming he’s gotten city spending under control during his reign of profligate hiring, wage increases and giveaways of the public’s money.
All that’s wrong is the fault of Wall Street and the global recession and some mysterious force that obscured Southern California’s eternal sunshine.
“Over the last several weeks, we have allowed darkness to cloud our
optimism. I think that you could even say that we have
allowed the strain of the challenges we face to undermine civic unity.”
Unity? He barely got a majority a year ago against Walter Moore and eight others with little money or name recognition despite his own fame and bottomless pit of dirty political money.
Maybe he means how he achieved the impossible and united the citizenry and public employee unions in opposition to his policies and politics and even gotten the business community to suffer a crisis of confidence in his leadership to the point that only the promises made to them by unelected mayor Beutner has kept them in line.
Antonio is right about a couple of things:e thing: This isn’t why he was elected to office and it is going to be “a tough time for everyone” — even him.
The mayor’s “sunshine” State of the City speech lasted just 27 minutes and he was interrupted by applause just once with applause by an audience packed with friends and campaign contributors.
Here’s how it played in a brilliant six-minute report on KCAL9 Monday night:
Let me tell you about my Grampa Hymen who worked as a tailor in sweatshops so my mother could get a high school education and I could grow up to be a spoiled brat with a degree from a great university.
I’ve lived my whole life believing everyone deserves the same opportunities to enjoy decent wines from BevMo during the 5 cents for the second bottle sales and to dine occasionally at Pocket Pita and Fab Dogs whether or not they are actually willing to go to school, get jobs and obey the laws.
In recent years, I have done everything humanly possible to hire more city workers and raise taxes, fees and rates to balance the city budget but it has become obvious that Goldman Sachs and those other Wall Street thieves have brought our nation and our city to its financial knees despite my best efforts.
I have given bonuses to city workers to retire, singled out one union for furloughs even as I was giving big raises to my friends at the DWP, threatened to fire every worker I came scross at City Hall who wasn’t on my staff. But economic forces beyond my control have convinced me that even my best intentions have not been enough.
So let me be for the first to tell you what this budget does not do: this budget does not reflect why I ran for office.
I ran for office to enrich my friends whether they were in business or labor, to be able to be governor of this great state, maybe even President of this even greater nation.
A lot of things haven’t worked out quite the way I had planned because of forces beyond my control, but I still intend to make our great city the global center of green energy, green technology, green billionaires — let all those others be green with envy
And I am going to take the $40 billion you gave me to spend over the next 30 years and do a little bait-and-switch and spend it all in 10 years to build half the transportation projects you were promised. I can give you numerical projections based on stochastic analyses that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt I am a genius and political spinning the likes of which this poor town has never seen.
I know that the naysayers and troublemakers out there have made a big deal about how I botched the budget and pushed the city to bankruptcy.
They whine and complain about how tried to use back room deals and lies to raise your DWP rates to the point it would throw thousands of you out on the streets like all those other people who have lost just and homes and businesses under my leadership.
But who are these people and who cares what they think? Do they dine nightly on the finest foods and wines available anywhere in this city, do they have girlfriends as beautiful as mine?
I am the only one who would dare to stand in front of you and tell you the truth about the future of our city.
I guarantee you with all the integrity in my being that no matter what happens, no matter what blundering greed and stupidity we at City Hall do in the coming year, the brilliant sun will always shine 300 days a year on Los Angeles.
HELP WANTED: Fantastic pay and benefits, luxurious working conditions, huge support staff, prestifious position. Apply now to be a Los Angeles City Council member. Seven seats open in March 2011 election. The LA CLEAN SWEEP CAMPAIGN (lacleansweep.com launching soon) needs great candidates ready to stand up for the residents, workers and businesses. Requirements: Integrity, honesty, openness, commitment to the common good, vision of a great city. Must be willing to work hard, walk door-to-door, raise money, fight for what’s right. Send resume and cover letter to [email protected] email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
This is for real. We must turn around City Hall and restore public confidence in our city government.
The steering committee of the CLEAN SWEEP CAMPAIGN met Saturday in Hollywood and took the first critical steps to organizing a political action committee to field a slate of candidates to challenge for the even-numbered Council seats now held by Paul Krekorian, Tom LaBonge, Tony Cardenas, Bernard Parks, Herb Wesson, Greig Smith and Jose Huizar.
They must be held accountable for the budget crisis that has damaged the city’s credit and credibility and threatens to force LA into bankruptcy. Services already are being slashed with the elimination of nearly 7,000 city jobs, DWP rates are soaring along with fees, penalties and taxes — and the crisis only gets worse for years to come.
Leaders of the Saving LA Project and the LA Neighborhood Council Coalition who worked together with dozens of other community groups of all types all across the city to help win three elections last year have come together to form the CLEAN SWEEP CAMPAIGN.
College professors and students, activists with Neighborhood Councils and homeowner groups discussed a campaign platform, candidate selection process and the strategy and tactics for a citywide campaign to bring responsible leadership to City Hall, Council members who will truly serve the public and not themselves and special interests.
Nearly 40 specific fixes were proposed and will be refined by the platform committee. Here are the four pinnacles of the draft platform along with some of the proposals that were made: LA CLEAN SWEEP PLATFORM 1. CLEAN UP CITY HALL — We need a change of leadership. The failure of our leaders is clear to everyone, We need tough penalties and enforcement of ethics law violations and immediate and full disclosure of campaign contributions and interests even as new leaders develop reforms, including clean money campaign financing that break the power of special interests. The Department of Water and Power Commission, Community Redevelopment Agency and other commissions must have independence free of political control. All city agencies, task forces and Council committees must have representatives appointed by Neighborhood Councils. Transparency, openness, public access to all documents must be enacted under an open access law. 2. FIX THE BUDGET — Spending must be brought under control for the benefit of the city’s 4 million residents and hundreds of thousands of businesses. Salaries of city officials must be reduced along with Council and mayoral staffing, slush funds and office holder accounts eliminated. Adjustments must be made to the employee wage and pension system. Tax, rate and fee policies must be restructured to create a healthy economic environment. 3. FOCUS ON CORE SERVICES — The focus of city government must be on basic services that benefit the whole community, not as a jobs and patronage programs. Protection of police and fire services and infrastructure. Parks, libraries, street maintenance, integrated planning to preserve neighborhood health, enforcement of building codes and fair share of city services are paramount. Services provided by city staff must be cost-effective with those of the private sector. 4. POWER SHARING — Elect City Council members who put the interests of the whole city ahead of any special interest. Empower Neighborhood Councils to make the first decisions on all local development issues. Create a commission to develop a plan for a borough system of government. Establish that a key function of city government is to encourage public participation and treat all people with respect and courtesy.
This is a working document and all suggestions are welcome.
No one is excluded for consideration as a candidate for the CLEAN SWEEP slate, even incumbents who can make the case that their record shows a true commitment to the interests of all segments of the community and to the greatest good of the city.
This is a great undertaking that will take support from everyone who cares about the state of the city today and our hopes for a better tomorrow.
I urge you to get involved for the good of your families, your neighborhood, your city.
The mayor is missing a beat by not using his $1-a-year City Hall Master of Multitasking Austin Beutner to fulfill one of the most glaring of his many broken promises. Antonio’s almost forgotten Million Trees Program. Now there’s an idea that I can get behind, or next to, depending on the tree, of course.
Sure, all the political players are buzzing about Antonio putting Beutner, who’s supposed to be the mayor’s “job czar,” whatever the heck that means, to head the DWP for a while until they find someone dumb enough to take a job that rarely lasts more than a year — a job that puts you between the rock of IBEW boss Brian D’Arcy and the hard place of millions of people fed up with being ripped off.
In addition to the DWP, which has become somewhat of a death row for general managers, Beutner’s other responsibilities include Building and Safety, Airports and the Harbor among half a dozen or more departments.
Beutner told Rick Orlov of the Green Sheet yesterday, in an exclusive interview that must have really pissed off some editors at the Dog Trainer, if they even noticed, that he was going to perform his DWP duties from his City Hall office.
Bruno found out this morning though that’s not the case with A Million Trees.
Sneaking out of the backyard while Saint Deb was at work and Ron was banging on his computer – he types like he talks – I headed down to the corner of Winnetka and Victory looking for a good spot to make sure other dogs knew this was Bruno’s neighborhood.
And there he was! In an orange jumpsuit and hardhat, the guy who is for all intents and purposes running the nation’s second largest city, planting a tree.
I’m sure it was him. He was fearless even when Bruno did the old bark-and-lunge attack like he was going to rip his throat out.
Only a guy who made billions, enjoyed going 100 miles an hour down mountains on a bike (until he racked it up) and hangs out in a den of thieves could be so unmoved by Bruno’s feints.
Bruno: What ya’ doing?
Beutner: Planting a tree.
Bruno: Why?
Beutner: Because the mayor’s way short of his promise to plant a million of them.
Bruno: May I sniff it?
Beutner: Sure, but behave yourself.
Bruno: It’s a beauty. Didn’t the mayor also promise to take over the schools and build a subway to the sea?
Beutner: He did? Oh my God! When did he promise that? I used to be in the private sector. I never read the newspapers, except the business page.
Bruno: When he was elected.
Beutner: I bet I get stuck with those turkeys too!
For all the mayor and City Council’s threat to lay off up to 4,000 city workers on top of the 2,400 paid off to retire and the 400 or so who got transferred to non-general fund jobs, the mayor sent a letter to the Council on Monday outlining his strategy for the 2010-11 budget year. About 750 actual workers face layoffs or more likely transfers. Go to OurLA.org to see the list of 3,546 positions affected by his moves. Here’s the mayor’s letter:
Dear Honorable Members of the City Council:
I am transmitting for your information the list of position eliminations that are currently incorporated as part of my proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2010-11. The service impacts and cost savings related to the elimination of these positions will be presented as part of my budget submission tomorrow.
The list totals 3,546 positions; including both Regular and Resolution positions. The funding sources for these positions are both General Fund and Special Funds. These eliminations incorporate positions that have been vacated as a result of regular attrition, the Early Retirement Incentive Program (ERIP), expedited transfers to special fund positions and proprietary departments, and layoffs.
According to preliminary information from departments, approximately 750 positions may be currently filled by individuals that will result in displacements to other departments and layoffs.
Please note this list of position eliminations only portrays a portion of the budget solutions I have relied upon to present a balanced budget for Fiscal Year 2010-11. My office stands ready to discuss these proposed position eliminations as part of the City Council’s budget deliberation process.
In the brutal world of mergers and acquisitions, the key to success in gobbling up poorly managed firms is focusing on the core business and scaling back runaway costs.
That’s how Austin Beutner made his fortune at the giant Blackstone Group and later in his own boutique private equity firm Evercore Partners. It’s a ruthless business and Beutner was one of the best at it. You get rid of failed managers, bring in smart, tough people, fire a lot of workers, demand wage concessions, eliminate unproductive functions and rebuild a lean and mean business that generates big profits. Then, you sell it for an even bigger profit.
So, now that he’s moved to the public sector, generously working for a buck a year, how is Beutner applying his method for success as he takes over as the ninth DWP general manager in 10 years?
“The first job is finding a permanent general
manager,” Beutner told RIck Orlov in the Daily News in a revealing interview on Sunday. “You cannot expect to have an agency
develop any stability when there is so much turnover at the top.”
OK, a good place to start no doubt, and hopefully the new boss will actually know something about running a utility unlike many of those who have been in charge in recent years. With people like David Freeman hanging around that has proven impossible but Beutner is no David Freeman so he will undoubtedly find a capable person from outside.
We also learn he is not a hands-on manager, interim or not, and will not operate from the lavish 15th floor office of the GM at the DWP building, preferring to stay at City Hall.
“Hire good people and hold them accountable…What I want to do is make sure the mayor, the commission and the City
council are all sharing the same information…and see what we can do to restore
trust.”
Wait just a minute, the mayor and DWP Commission are the problem as much as anyone. They are the cause of the loss of trust. And the Council doesn’t care about trust, its members are only concerned about the wrath of the public and business community because of DWP’s out-of-control costs, soaring rates, mismanagement, endless sweetheart deals, failure to plan, total lack of honesty and transparency — just to name a few problems.
But none of that is mentioned by Beutner — ratepayers aren’t even a phrase that enters his mind.
But Brian D’Arcy does. Beutner has already met with the IBEW union boss and made peace, guaranteeing him that his power and his inflated wage deals are not in jeopardy.
“What people don’t realize is that at the DWP, labor is only
25 percent of its cost,” Beutner said. “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.”
So the people who “have made labor the issue” are obviously of no importance even though wages and benefits are 20 to 40 percent too high and hundreds of jobs are nothing but featherbedding and workplace discipline is lax.
And what does he mean by “costs are in line”? In line with what? In line with how the mayor wants to enrich his pals and portray himself as the greenest big mayor in America even if it bankrupts the city and many of its residents and businesses?
Beutner was hired to create jobs and is in charge of all the big pots of money in a dozen city agencies including the harbor, airport and planning. So is he being put directly in charge of the DWP to use his business skills to reduce costs and focus on the core business of supplying the city water and power or to use all the money the DWP can get its hands on for subsidies to buy jobs no matter how many jobs are killed by rate hikes?
First up is approval of contracts to keep the Scattergood power
line project moving despite widespread complaints from Westsiders
that it threatens their health and quality of life.
That’s
followed by giving vast amounts of water for the massive Grand
Avenue project, water that is available because we’ve cut our own
water use by nearly 20 percent even as we face soaring water bills and
bursting pipes thanks to DWP’s well-documented ineptitude. The developer
paid the $10,000 cost of DWP research into determining there’s enough
water and designing a long list of conservation measures. $10,000?
Then,
there are deals being cut with Inyo County
and Mammoth
Lakes that will help officials there with economic development in
exchange for letting the DWP cover Owens Lake with 80 square miles of
solar panels — a project the scale and cost of which is unlike anthing the has ever seen.
Don’t be impatient, it gets worst fast.
Item 13:
involves a $668,444 three-year contract with Huron Consulting for
“Strategic Plan and Competitive Intelligence Implementation Consulting
and Services.”
This is the same firm that was paid $150,000 for
an instant analysis that was used to promote Measure B by DWP officials
even as they were suppressing a comprehensive five-year study by PA
Consulting that showed the utility was badly managed and operating in
the dark without a strategic plan.
So if DWP wants to keep the
public ignorant, they hire Huron to fudge an uncritical strategic plan
to go with the $775,000: in contracts the firm already has for solar
energy projects and other schemes.
It is nothing but a blatant
payoff that will deepen public mistrust — something that ought to mean Beutner will
put a stop to it if the public trust counts in his calculus.
Will he object to Item 14’s
transfer of “11 substitute tree surgeon assistants” from Street
Services to be paid from DWP operating revenues or the payment of $123.7
million in subsidies for DWP workers and retirees health plans under Item 17?
And
how does Item
22 for buying a property with DWP funds so that the CRA can
subsidize private companies to cash in on “clean technology” fit into
the nation’s largest utility’s mission to provide water and power to the
city?
Or does this go to the heart of what Beutner’s real
mission is: Using his credibility to disarm the business community so he
can raise rates to buy jobs?
Or maybe the nearly $700 million a
year the mayor wants from increased rates right now is to buy wind power from
Oregon under a long-term contract at the astronomical price of
nearly $100 per megawatt/hour — five times the price of coal, twice the
price of gas — and for the DWP to own and install solar panels atop
city buildings under a 40-year deal with General Services, Item 23?
These,
of course, are all rhetorical questions. The answers are obvious. What
is going on is just a continuation of the ripping off the public to feed
the insatiable appetite of the IBEW and the mayor and his pals for our
money without regard to public costs and benefits.
Everything on
Tuesday’s agenda flies right in the face of Beutner’s own success based
on taking over failing businesses, cutting costs and focusing on the
core mission.
They are clearing the decks in advance of the
Council’s approval without objection or any serious questioning beyond
some posturing for their own self-aggrandizement.
This just sets
the stage for approval of the 20 to 30 percent rate hikes that will
actually be more like 50 percent for many businesses and homeowners
because they intend to provide massive subsidies to businesses and
residents facing “hardships” and subsidies to anyone who will bring jobs
to the city, even if most of them are in sweatshops or pay no more than
the living wage.
Bruno has heard rumors that Antonio is, well, kind of cheap. I know, I know, this dog has had lots of fun with our mayor for living like a high roller – the mansion, a very rich taste in food and wine, world travel, body guards and the rest. But remember, he doesn’t actually pay for any of that stuff. You pay for some of it and rich friends pick up lots of tabs.
When it comes to paying out of his own pocket, Antonio is tighter than a chihuahua’s ass. At least that’s what I hear.
And the rumor seems to be confirmed with Antonio’s appointment of $1-a-year jobs czar Austin Beutner to “temporarily” take over the beleaguered DWP in addition to his other responsibilities — including Building and Safety, Airports and the Harbor and 10 others agencies. . Golly, if Antonio found a few more guys like Beutner, the budget crisis would be over, the streets and sidewalks would be paved and we’d have the 15,000 cops on the streets to really clean up this town.
While there’s been a lot of speculation that Beutner would replace crazy old David Freeman, Rick Orlov had the exclusive Sunday afternoon. The mayor must be pissed at the Dog Trainer.
“I’m keeping my office in City Hall,” the new undisputed master of City Hall multitasking told Orlov. “It’s a short walk or ride from the DWP.”
Well, at least Beutner knows where the building is. That’s a start.
And he wasn’t particularly flattering about how the mayor has handled the recent crisis. You can do that when you’re only making a buck a year and doing the jobs of a dozen or people.
Orlov said Beutner would not discuss the recent dispute over the increase in the Energy Cost Adjustment Factor, other than to say he believed it could have been handled better.
“I think now is a time to take a step back,” he told Orlov. “What I want to do is make sure the mayor, the commission and the City council are all sharing the same information and make sure we avoid falling in to the same sort of trap.”
That would be nice.
And Beutner said he met with guy who really runs the department — Brian D’Arcy, IBEW Local 18 business manager.
“People have made labor the issue,” Beutner said, “and I don’t think it’s the top issue facing the agency.”
Huh? Labor became the issue when D’Arcy’s union was getting 6 percent raises when the economy tanked and more big pay raises for the next 35 dog years while other city employees were getting fired.
No wonder Beutner told Orlov that he believes he can “establish a positive working relationship” with the union boss. After all, D’Arcy has been running the place while the guys supposedly in charge got run out at the rate of one a year for a decade.
“What people don’t realize is that at the DWP, labor is only 25 percent of its cost,” Beutner said. “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.”
Beutner better watch out. D’Arcy gets what he wants – and he doesn’t trust people who work for one dollar a year. Thinks they must be stupid..
Reform LA — the new organizing group for the “Clean Sweep” campaign to clean up City Hall — will meet at 9:45 a.m. Saturday at the Hollywood Community Center, 6501 Fountain Ave.
The goal is to develop strategies to recruit credible candidates and form a political action committee for the elections next march for the even-numbered City Council districts — Paul Krekorian, Tom LaBonge, Tony Cardenas, Bernard Parks, Herb Wesson, Jose Huizar and Greig Smith’s open seat.
Recent events involving DWP rate hikes and the city budget and coming events that will show how dire the city’s financial condition is with public services being slashed, massive job layoffs and sell-off of valuable assets.
Don’t just get mad, get even by participating in the movement to change LA and bring responsible government to the city.
Reform LA was created by the Saving LA Project and the LA Neighborhood Council Coalition and is open to everyone in the city, residents, business people, labor and environmental activists — people who can come together and put the interests of the city ahead of all private beliefs and work for the common good.
We hope to put together a slate of candidates who can win and restore confidence in City Hall.
The City Council unanimously unanimously approved Friday increasing Detrich Brown Allen’s by $30,000 Friday, restoring her pay to $152,299 a year despite the elimination of the Environmental Affairs Department and her job as general manager.
It was done as part of the 12-0 approval of more than 20 agenda items without any discusion, totally routine.
She is now protected by Civil Service rules as an environmental officer in the Transportation Department, a job that is designated for a $122,607 salary. Since bringing this to light, I have learned other members of her staff who lost their jobs, with at least two moving to the DWP and one becoming the mayor’s deputy for “sustainability.
EDITOR’S NOTE: City Clerk’s office said today Perry and Parks voted against the Rule 23 procedure to take up DWP rate hikes. Parks, Perry, Zine, LaBonge and Krekorian voted against approving the rate hike.
Roughly 24 hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went before an emergency joint session of Congress and delivered his famous speech declaring Dec. 7, 1941 “a date which will live in infamy.”
Los Angeles now has its own date that will live in infamy — April 14, 2010.
It is the date that the City Council, in a back room conspiracy among themselves and with the mayor, blatantly trashed the rule of law.
In violation of the spirit and intend of the Brown Open Meeting Law, their own rules and the advice of their own attorney, the City Council under the direction and leadership of President Eric Garcetti took up a matter that was not on their agenda without public notice, declared a public emergency and then approvedan electricity rate hike before the DWP Board had even acted, an increase that doesn’t even take effect until July 1.
They did so without even making public who voted for and against.
It was all rigged in a back room deal. There was utterly no point to it other than to give the mayor a fig leaf to conceal the shame of his humiliating missteps and defeats in recent weeks. It showed the Council is just a bunch of toadies after all and their brief stand as elected representatives of the people was just a sham.
The action occurred after 3 p.m. when nearly every ordinary citizen had left the Chamber. Only one person, a man named Wayne Spindler, had lingered long enough to speak out in protest against this outrage. He ought to be honored as a folk hero, the lone voice of the people..
The urgency of this matter, the emergency, was not a riot in the streets or some crisis that could not wait a day, a week, even 10 weeks.
It was simply that the mayor and Council, with Herb Wesson of all people acting as go-between, had cut a deal to impose a 5 per cent rate increase on DWP’s electricity charges, .6 cents per kilowatt hour for one quarter.
It was the same rate hike they approved previously, only to have it rejected by the mayor and his lackeys on the DWP Commission who demanded .1 of a cent more — $6 million a quarter.
But it puts an end to the war between the mayor and the Council — a battle that exposed just how dishonest and incompetent they all are.
It has been orchestrated all week to salvage their careers no matter what it costs the public, no matter how unjustified their actions are. Just get it off the front pages of the newspapers, off the TV news off the blogs, off the thousands of emails flashing around the city and off the table talk conversation of growing numbers of people.
They didn’t like the conversation so they changed the conversation.
The conversation today will be the mayor’s announcement of new leadership for the discredited Department of Water and Power, revived efforts to make LA the greenest city in America and find news to bilk the residents and businesses out of every dollar they can to feed the environmental and union profiteers.
Then, at 5 p.m., the DWP Board will convene at its own “emergency” meeting to actually approve the .6 cent rate hike they rejected two weeks ago when it could have taken effect on April 1 instead of July 1.
This would the stuff of farce if it didn’t show just how tragically flawed our leaders are.
Watch how the smug Garcetti (as if he didn’t know it was going to happen) reveals the DWP Board had suddenly called its meeting with only 24 hours notice on a matter that had no urgency. See how he twists the truth to invoke Council Rule 23 that allows for action on a matter of urgency “on an item not posted on its Agenda for the meeting if it determines by a two-thirds vote that the need for such action arose after the posting of the Agenda.”
Even as she objects, Perry clearly knows the votes have been lined up in advance — itself a violation of the Brown Act, the state open meeting law.
She appeals to the Council’s attorney, Dion Connell, about whether Rule 16 should apply instead allowing for a new matter to be brought up during a meeting and referred to committee or set for the next agenda.
Connell, who does his best day after day to protect and serve his Council masters, squirms uncomfortably and declares there is nothing urgent about the issue so Perry is right, it should be brought up for a vote.
No matter. Presiding officer Dennis Zine, who started growing a beard the day he decided to cross the line and become a totally corrupt politician, ignores the legal advice and proceeds to a vote on invoking Rule 23, which passes 11-2 — one vote more than was needed.
Who voted with Perry? We don’t know because Zine turned off the tally box that appears whenever the Council votes. He keeps it off for the 8-5 vote on backing the rate hike so we don’t know who was for it and who against as they got a bare majority. The video shows Bil Rosendahl and others looking up at the Council TV screens to see the vote breakdown but it never appears.
Just before the rigged vote, the clerk reminds Zine that state law requires the public be given its two minutes to speak its mind even when nothing but the pretense of democracy still exists.
That’s when Wayne Spindler gets his moment of glory.
What’s so pathetic about this whole episode is Garcetti’s despicable gambit is meaningless, a symbolic act of surrender to the mayor’s will, a symbol of our leaders utter contempt for the people, for rational processes, for robust public debate of important issues.
It was simply the price they paid to get the mayor to order the DWP to transfer the $73.5 million it promised to turn over to the general fund from surplus power revenue, and maybe $20 million more as well.
It was nothing but blackmail, and the Council paid it to free the hostage money.
DWP’s financial troubles are a myth invented to raise rates 20 to 30 percent on the road to doubling and tripling them in the years ahead.
. This is DWP’s third trip to the well of public money so the IBEW, the greenwashers and the green profiteers in the mayor’s inner circle can get their hands on billions of dollars of the public’s money.
Measure B was defeated at the polls despite Garcetti’s best effort to keep secret the damaging consultant’s report on the DWP.
The second effort in recent weeks also failed because there is no plan for anything except to steal the public’s money, there is no transparency, no credibility.
We may not remember the date of this disgrace. But we should never forget the betrayal by our elected officials. They do it to us every day and if we let them get away with it, we become complicit in their crimes..
With the DWP Commission calling a special meeting on rate hikes for 5 p.m. Thursday, Council President Eric Garcetti — apparently acting in concert with mayor who is expected to make a major announcement Thursday — pushed through approval of 5.7 percent increase on an 8-5 vote.
Here’s the video of Councilwoman Jan Perry, who has spearheaded efforts for dramatic reforms of the DWP, explaining why Garcetti’s action was premature.
The Council voted 8-5 to approve the rate hike in advance of the DWP Commission meeting where the agenda merely said it will discuss its decision for an ECAF increase.
The Council under an obscure rule took up the issue without any public notice. The vote was 8-5 but who voted on each side was not broadcast on Channel 35 and is not on the city website. The timing was clearly staged and it is being acknowledged that Herb Wesson was the intermediary of a backroom deal.
How Council members voted was not shown on Ch. 35 and is not posted on Council website.
Chastened from the intensity of attacks on him at a community meeting Tuesday, Councilman Tom LaBonge — who previously supported DWP rate hikes — flipped Wednesday and voted against without explanation. LaBonge, a former DWP executive and long-time supporter, got a pass because a bare majority was rigged to support the increase.
Here is the statement the mayor issue afterwards:
STATEMENT FROM MAYOR VILLARAIGOSA ON THE CITY COUNCIL’S COMPROMISE PLAN FOR DWP RATES
LOS ANGELES – Mayor Villaraigosa issued the following statement after the City
Council passed a compromise plan for rate increases at the Department of Water
and Power:
“I’d like to thank the members of the City Council who today offered a
reasonable compromise which protects ratepayers, the financial health of the
Department of Water and Power, and commits the DWP to renewable energy and I
urge the members of the Commission to adopt this reasonable plan.”
My wife and I have talked for years about putting solar panels on the roof of our small Valley floor bungalow, at least she has.
It would complement her organic farm in the front yard and her cactus garden in the back yard and make us feel better about ourselves for doing the right thing, she says.
But somebody has to be financially responsible and on this rare occasion it’s my job to point out we would never get our money back because the DWP refuses use AB 811 and legitimate feed-in tariffs that would help amortize the costs in a way that makes financial as well as environmental sense. You have to understand why the DWP has operated the way it has to understand why it’s efforts to get their hands on billions of dollars in ratepayer money through Measure B and now the mayor’s Plan B for Measure B have failed in the face of massive public resistance.
David Freeman, as general manager of DWP a decade ago, announced the largest solar initiative in U.S. history a decade ago. He squandered tens of millions of dollars on dirty giveaways of the public’s money and 10 years later achieved a negligible amount of rooftop solar.
It was all hot air because the IBEW fought it every inch of the way. The union has only come to support green energy after extorting commitments that thousands of more overpaid jobs would be added to the DWP payroll and its membership roster no matter what the cost to the public.
There are other ways and an online friend of mine Sheila Bowers, who lives both here and in the desert and fought successfully to stop DWP’s wasteful and environmentally destructive Green Path North powerline project, has offered a primer to understanding how we can get green energy at a price that we can afford.
She points to Paul Gipe’s recent report at his website wind-works.org where green energy developments are closely followed and she has been posting in the comments section here intelligent and informed explanations of how we can get solar energy at a price we can afford and create real jobs in the private sector at the same time. If you want to understand the issues involved, read her primer on solar energy:
The truth is that DWP could EASILY hit their 40% FOR FREE if they weren’t dead set on monopolizing, recentralizing and destabilizing the grid using remote, destructive Big Solar and Big Wind.
Los Angeles has enough solar insolation to be a NET EXPORTER OF PEAKER POWER from its rooftops alone, yet the city bakes and sprawls endlessly, while imperialist adventures to outlying communities waste time and money.
If LA would simply fund its AB 811 loans (no risk loans because city takes first lien on property), expand its net metering program and implement a basic Feed in Tariff (so property owners are PAID fairly for producing more clean energy than they use), LA could have all the solar power it needed and then some, at NO NET COST TO RATEPAYERS!!!
This is not funny math, this is simple. Ratepayer generators will net out the cost of their systems by a combination of offsets (net metering), amortization of loans (AB 811 is 20 years), and FITs (to encourage oversizing where it makes sense). They will also see increased property values immediately without increased property taxes.
Loans cost the city nothing and can even make it a small amount in interest if it administers funds carefully. Net metering costs the city nothing because it greatly decreases demand for the most costly power, and fuel/delivery costs are offset. FITs for the tiny amount of power produced above that used that is then re-sold at peaker rates costs virtually nothing.
THIS is what all utilities are afraid we will realize. That we can not only “green the grid” but that we can stabilize and democratize it using point of use solutions within our built environment. These clowns are panicking that we will learn the truth, but they hardly need worry since the media REFUSES to report on this simple paradigm that could save the economy, property values, our wilderness and our planet. It’s horrifying that people are ignoring this!!
We need to push for $250 million/year in AB 811 funding so we can install efficiency upgrades and solar panels on our homes and businesses. We need to push for Feed in Tariffs for those who produce clean power above and beyond what they use. We need to publicize this FREE and FAIR way to clean our grid, and STOP the destruction of our beautiful wilderness (Pine Tree Wind and Owens Valley are 2 great examples). ___________________________________
AB811 is not a subsidy, it is a loan program that costs ratepayers NOTHING. Every MW of clean solar generation installed using an AB811 loan could add to the RPS at NO COST to ratepayers (if RPS is ethically and realistically calculated). This is in stark contrast to Big Wind, Big Solar and Big Transmission, which will cost ratepayers a FORTUNE and destroy our wilderness areas and deplete water sources.
Ratepayer generators should not be penalized for installing solar on their roofs – it should not be a “sacrifice.” We should be allowed to net meter to the amount of power we use and to be paid fairly (Feed in Tariff) for any amount we produce and do not consume. Net metering costs other ratepayers NOTHING, because it reduces grid congestion and fuel consumption. So all that clean, local, solar power? FREE. Free to ratepayer-generators. Free to non-generating ratepayers.
With AB 811 loans, ratepayer generators can zero out their system costs on an annual basis using net metering and FIT payments, amortized across 20 years. FIT-purchased power is RESOLD by the DWP for close to purchase price, and only the tiny incremental costs between resale price (say, 30 cents for peaker) and FIT paid price (50 cents), and only for that power above and beyond net metering (say 5% of the gross solar power produced) is passed on to ratepayers. It will not even register on utility bills.
The system I propose is cheaper to us than the German system, where they buy 100% of the power at the premium price (about 80 cents) instead of net metering first, and it makes rooftop solar within reach of every single home and business owner in the City who has a sunny roof.
Personally, I don’t have much faith in DWP to handle the city-property solar affordably or competently, but as long as WE get the programs WE need, and WE are counted in the RPS calculations as full generators, rather than as “demand reduction,” the City can do what it wants with its rooftops as long as the CITY pays for it out of their existing budget (just like us). They need to get costs down so that energy savings offsets pay for their rooftop systems, JUST LIKE US.
_____________________________
Firstly, the loan is not “subsidized” by anyone. Money is lent, then it is repaid with modest interest that covers administration costs. No subsidies at all. There are dozens of ways to raise the money, from ARRA funds, muni bonds, private investors, etc. Lots of information out there on this program already and lots of other counties and cities are already funding it.
Secondly, most homes will net out (after current rebates and tax credits) in the under $20K range, unless they are doing massive retrofits for efficiency upgrades at the same time as PV or unless we start getting fair payment for producing more power than we need. Nobody’s going off-grid here, so people can size conservatively.
1BOG is securing pricing in the $6/watt range, before rebates and tax credits, which should knock another 50-60% off, putting us in the $2 – $3/watt range after all is said and done. Average homes are installing 3.5 kW systems, which would then net out at about $10,500. Repaid via AB 811 over 20 years, that’s gonna be $600/year with interest, or $50/month to produce ~80% of total power. Entire cost will be offset by reduction in bill (and/or FIT).
2. I am not sure where you get “over 2800 MW” as a 33% RPS in a system that peaks at 6,000 MW. 33% is the state number. 40% is just a childish one-upsman number from a grandstanding mayor, but it is still completely do-able even without ripping off ratepayers and decimating outlying communities and ecosystems.
Since solar produces generally at peak times, and since 50-55% of the total power in the city is consumed during those 4-6 peak hours, it seems all we would need for 33% is just under 2,000 MW, and that assumes no reduction in energy consumption, which is unlikely if current trends continue.
If the average home installation is 3.5kW and the average industrial is, say 25kW, and there are 1.4 million electrical connections in the DWP system, I feel like it would absolutely be achievable to secure 2,000 MW from private rooftops alone. Don’t forget that LA is a major industrial center with lots of baking, sprawling, single-story buildings. If a million of those are homes and apartments, and only 1/3 of them put “average” solar up, we’d have ~1200 MW. If the other 400,000 were business connections and only 20% of them installed a 25 kW system, we would have ~2,000 MW. These are just a few random illustrations.
And hey, if the City wanted to fund their own panels and contribute to the RPS just like us, using it’s own offsets to repay itself for the cost of the panels, like I said, I would be fine, delighted, as long as the program offers real, human ratepayers a clean, fair shot at participating, and the City didn’t stick us with the bill both coming and going. They can play on the same field as us.
Parking lots, brownfields, you name it, they should definitely do it – on their own dime, for the same reasons we do it, because it’s the right thing and it makes environmental and economic sense. They should not do it to strengthen their chokehold over ratepayers and small communities like Owens Valley. They should not do it as a backdoor tax to fund City programs. They should not do it to greenwash an otherwise devastating environmental mess.
3. If you want to complain about the RPS system, and how unreliable solar will be, that’s not my trip – that’s a political game these guys play that has nothing to do with what is needed. I could care less if their soundbyte number is 25%, 80% or 50% – we need to max out the built environment with efficiency upgrades and point of use generation before we start slaughtering wilderness – that’s my point and it should be a no-brainer.
Obviously we need improved storage solutions and load balancing and we need to keep the gas peakers online so they can jump in – just like they do now – to compensate for shortfalls. But the timing of Big Solar and local solar production is identical, so rooftops completely defeat the need for Big Solar and its Big Transmission. Can we agree on that?
3 (again). I think I’ve been pretty clear how I would change the system. AB811 loans and feed in tariffs. Democratic not monopolistic ownership of solar and microwind generation. Removal of all caps on system sizes. Favorable business climate for clean energy manufacturers and installers. No dead wilderness and species, no water depletion (geothermal, solar thermal), no SF6-spewing powerlines (29,000 times more potent GHG than CO2, emitted by powerline infrastructure), no eminent domain, improved property values, well-paying local jobs, and healthy open spaces we can all still enjoy. All for much less cost to us than the current boondoggles they have planned. That’s all i want. is that too much to ask?
The bad news keeps coming for the DWP — even on a day when its management was boasting to the world how the public had reduced water consumption to a 32-year low but couldn’t answer questions about the impact of conservation on its revenue.
Professor Jean-Pierre Bardet, the head of USC’s civil engineering department, said a team of scientists he led has determined that DWP’s requirement that lawns only be watered on Mondays and Thursdays caused uneven pressures that stressed pipes and led to the rash of blowouts of water mains last summer and fall.
“The bottom line is, you want to create a more even usage of water
pressure so you don’t have a sudden drop of water pressure at a given
time of the day,” said Bardet, told Councilwoman Jan Perry’s Energy and Environment Committee Tuesday afternoon.
The ream’s report said: “Those water pressure drops on these days were caused by an increased
water flow during the watering of lawns. As a result,
the cyclic levels of water pressure increased and accelerated the metal
fatigue failures of aged and corroded cast-iron pipes.”
The DWP’s initial reaction was to deny the report and try to deflect responsibility for an ill-conceived water rationing policy, according to statements the utility released. Here’s KPCC’s updated report:
The DWP has released a statement about Bardet’s report,
indicating nobody there has yet read it. “The Department believes
corrosion is the indisputable and primary factor in most of our water
main breaks, including those from last September,” the DWP statement
says. “We believe Dr. Bardet’s findings will support this position.”
DWP says its own internal report blames blowouts in September
2009 on system pressures created by repairing breaks from earlier in
the summer. “It is the Department’s position that the operational
changes to accommodate City Trunk Line repairs resulted in ruptures on
mostly cast iron mains, which accounts for the increased severity of the
breaks in the weeks that followed,” the report says.
Let’s hope the mayor delivers on his promise by Thursday and cleans out those at DWP responsible for its many failures and bring transparency and professionalism to the nation’s largest municipal utility.
Of course, you’ll have a hard time find anyone to book your bet on him delivering what he has promised.
“Preliminary concepts say the park would likely be built as part of a public-private partnership that would involve some new high-rise construction. A community meeting on the project is scheduled for May 13 at Caltrans headquarters, according to Curbed L.A.”
