L.A. Times reports DWP rate hike as 37% over four years.

"DWP plans 37% rate hike over four years to cover cost increases - The L.A. utility's managers unveiled the plan as the council's Energy and Environment Committee debated the mayor's proposal to boost rates to pay for renewable energy." By David Zahniser, March 26, 2010, L.A. TIMES,
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dwp-rates26-2010mar26,0,787576.story This story was from late on Thursday. On Friday, the city council voted 13-1 to reject the DWP's request for the first of 4 rate hikes so that they could look at it more carefully. The rate hikes may come, and from what I see from people in the know, the first one may be a reasonable result, but the others need to be checked and dissassembled to see what is there breakdown on the components. Lumping in all the ECAF into one mix covers up what's going on and prevents any analysis to see what kind of job the DWP is doing.

This was another example of the city council beginning to step back from the mayor more and more. The Mayor's influence is weakening as the council appears to recognize the mayor as a political liability these days, as more people see the results that the city's top elected official let happen.

Council members chastised the mayor for saying in a 14-page briefing paper that a rejection of the rate hike would force the city into bankruptcy since the utility would no longer be able to afford to make the general fund contribution. On Thursday, Villaraigosa disavowed use of the word "bankruptcy" yet continued to warn that unless his plan is approved, the city would run out of money by June 30.

Villaraigosa criticized foes of the rate hike for using his briefing paper as part of the debate, saying the report was meant for city staffers only. "That was another example of the kind of [political] opportunism I've seen in the last few days," he said

The problem with the mayor is that he tells so many different stories to so many different people he losses track of it all. The report that carried the bankruptcy reference that caused so much commotion was distributed to media and if it was supposed to be a restricted access document, it wasn't handled as such. Besides, this just shows the mayor's speaking with, and I use that "Lone Ranger" dialogue, a "forked tongue" and not being forthright. The last time I remember he said something about erroneous refrences to documents was when his "11% Mayor" L.A. Weekly story used his own calendar for the basis of calculation of his activity. The Mayor said, "They used the wrong calendar." Tsk, tsk, you are not supposed to have what sounds like a "real" book and the "other real book." Matt Szabo tried to cover up with another, "He misspoke, there's only one book," attempt to save the day.

The Mayor in one of his changes of personality, said he would never even USE the word, (bankruptcy). He sad that he would never allow that to happen." Well, if you run out of money to pay all the expenses that are due, it is going to happen. There is a lot going on in City Hall with the budget balancing attempts continuing while the DWP wants to slide in the requests for rate hikes that would keep raising your DWP bill.

City Employees Salary Database added in sidebar.

There's a Daily News link to an L.A. City Employees Salary database that I have added to the City sidebar and here http://lang.dailynews.com/socal/citypayroll/ which you can use to see what kind of salaries go with jobs in the city system. There's an explanation on that site for more details on the source and interpretation of the numbers shown.

From just checking a few things here, I can see why everyone wants to hang on to these jobs. The pay levels are really nice and what I see from that is that there's room for some cuts spread across a lot of employees to keep many more of them from their losing jobs altogether. There's a huge listing of "comments" posted by readers and what I see is that most are negative on the pay that's going out. One quick check on some of these showed a comment from a city employee, a manager, I believe, who said a problem was that there are often too many employees, shown by the fact that many don't have a lot of work to do , but that since a supervisor has budget money to use or lose, that keeps them staffing like that, given the options.
I don't know all the details, but insiders could see more and not all the details are known by all. The DWP information is not here and I checked for my own last name to see if my semi-long lost cousin at LAPD was there. What I found was that that no police officers are listed, only the LAPD's civilian employees. I did find there's at least 21 people with my last name working for the city, and even one with the same name- first and last, too. I compare that result to some time in high school or earlier when I checked the telephone book listings for the city when there was just one big book for everywhere- there were about 10 listings at the most for my last name and about half were my relatives. But on the L.A. City payroll, there's no one I know among those 21, so you see how big the city has become and how big the city's work force has grown.

DWP is going to be collecting more from you, but why?

Here is more from a Tuesday entry on Ron Kaye's blog http://www.ronkayela.com/ that you can examine to see that the DWP collects and has been collecting for years, loads of money. "DWP Calling: Your Money or Your Life (Or Why We Need to Know Where Our Money Goes)," By Ron Kaye on October 27, 2009. http://ronkayela.com/2009/10/dwp-calling-your-money-or-your.html


You might have sensed that part about collecting loads of money from you, but did you ever wonder WHERE it went? All that money was collected as a public utility only have it passed along to the "General Fund" of the city to use as it pleases. Instead, they could have been using it to improve service and maintain facilities and infrastructure.

The DWP collected so much money that the City Council had simply used it as a regular supplier of cash, not really doing much for the utility's customers of water and electricity. Remember, too, that this is a monopoly, the only game in town, and you really have no choice when it comes to sellers of water and electricity. It's all DWP and only DWP when it comes to getting electricity or water.

Check the numbers and see the added note at the beginnig of the October 27 blog posting that reflects the City Council meeting's outcome. The DWP requested approval for bonds for applying to DWP improvement on Tuesday, October 28, 2009. Bonds are the way that money is obtained. Actually it is borrowed to pay for things such as government projects. They are very expensive and the amount used comes from selling them to investors who will get paid back, usually from more taxes imposed upon the publie. The High Speed Rail to San Francisco sounded cool and I
am sure many voted to approve the project because of that, but it won't be ready for many years, while the costs to cover the bond repayment begins to mount fairly promptly.

That approval by the City Council, often colorfully referred to by many critics as the "City Clowncil," is mentioned in the linked posting and repeated below:

Editor's Note: The City Council, after a lengthy debate about Google
vs. Microsoft email products, unanimously approved both the water and power bond plans of DWP without debate, setting the stage for further rate increases. Google email won unanimous approval to be City Hall's email.

The DWP has a history of actions that cause most reasonable people from wondering, "Who's in charge here, anyway?" This ranges from the breast feeding classes for employees paid for at the work site by the DWP when the health insurance already provides this benefit, to the payments for an outside Public Relations company when an in-house ability already exists and when there is no other competing utility because DWP is a monopoly. All these came at hefty prices and the PR problem was corrected finally but it shows that they need serious watching.

By the way, David Nahai, ex-GM, resigned earlier this month and is getting paid as a "consultant" to answer emails and phone calls "during business hours" at just under $150,000 for the time left this year. Nahai was solidly behind the breast feeding expenditure. That was back when Nahai and the IBEW (union) were more in agreement than when Nahai left. Ron Kaye's blog gives a lot more of the details for dozens of the city politicians' activities that are not what they should be doing for the public and the voters.