Readers React: DWP shouldn’t use ratepayer money to fix its billing mess

To the editor: Hasn’t anyone in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s brain trust of information technology consultants heard of a rollback plan in case the system doesn’t perform? (“Run DWP more like a business and less like a bureaucracy,” editorial, March 17)

With its recent disastrous billing system rollout, I guess they were just looking for computer error messages or printers run amok and spitting out bills in binary. They evidently weren’t examining how their new system was sending out bills that gouged the customer — you know, that pesky reality stuff.

Instead of even considering that ratepayers chip in to fix this fiasco, how about taking some money away from the Joint Training and Joint Safety institutes and putting it into fixing this debacle? We still can’t figure out why they need so much money.

Claw money back from the consultants. Write off the rest. Don’t come crying to the ratepayers. DWP made the mess; it must clean it up.

Mary Edwards, Los Angeles

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To the editor: We read one story after another regarding the incompetence of the DWP. It seems like it’s always the same old yarn, which is frustrating because the truth of the matter is that it’s the same excuses, but just worded differently.

That said, I have two simple questions:

First, where has the DWP ratepayer advocate, who earns at least $237,000 a year, been during this nightmare?

Second, how did former DWP General Manager Ron Nichols get paid more than $300,000 per year before bailing out in the middle of this mess and getting hired as an executive with Southern California Edison?

Richard Whorton, Studio City

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