Somebody’s in Hot Water : DWP’s Woes Continue as Wachs Receives Bogus Billing--for $205,667

The hapless Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, reeling from a string of highly publicized blunders and embarrassments, now has another one on its hands:

Sending City Councilman Joel Wachs a bill for $205,667.05.

“Oh. My. God,” gasped Anthony Cavallaro, the DWP’s commercial director in charge of billing, when he learned of the bill, dated June 10.

“We mail over 10 million bills a year, 50,000 bills a day, and 99% of them get to the right person,” Cavallaro said. “The odds of this happening to Joel Wachs is consistent with the luck the department has been having the last year.”

The DWP initially said it had mistakenly mailed Wachs a bill meant for a health care firm. (Although it bears the councilman’s home address, the bill lists the company’s name.)

But later in the day, officials said the bill may have been deliberately doctored.

“It looks to us like we’re dealing with a prankster or a disgruntled employee who’s playing a joke on the department or Mr. Wachs or both of us,” said Jim Derry, the DWP’s director of customer service. He said an internal investigation was started Thursday, after Wachs called to complain.

Derry said there were a number of suspicious elements to the case: Although Wachs typically receives a bill for two-month periods, the one in question covers service between Dec. 10, 1991 and May 12, 1992. In addition, the bill was prepared on bill stock retired years ago, and the listed water and sewer components--$80,091.94 for water and $126,621.42 for sewer service--are added incorrectly to total $205,667.05.

Wachs’ bill--mailed out by the agency in June--appeared to have been typed by hand, Derry said. Most of the department’s bills are prepared, stuffed and mailed automatically by computerized machinery.

“We checked the six typewriters we occasionally use to type bills and none of the fonts matched,” Derry said. “I don’t know how we’ll track it down, but we’ll keep looking for clues.”

Wachs said the episode was emblematic of the agency’s woes.

“If it’s a joke, it’s a bad one, and if it’s intentional, it’s also bad because it means someone can apparently tamper with bills,” Wachs said.

The incident is just the latest in a series of DWP bungles and embarrassments.

Last month the agency had to pay a $333,407 penalty for late tax filing because of a mail room mixup over $3.40 in postage.

A month earlier, the agency was pressured to cancel a $25,000 contract with the Center for Crisis Management at USC to study what went wrong in the agency’s humiliating failure to obtain approval for an 11% rate hike. The City Council blasted the planned study by the center, which has investigated high-profile industrial disasters in Bhopal, India, and elsewhere.

More recently, the DWP had to pull the plug on a costly venture to produce a commercially viable electric car, as its partner failed to raise the millions of dollars it promised to put the experimental vehicle into production.

In the Wachs case, meanwhile, there was an element of irony. Earlier this year, the councilman was embarrassed after he publicly railed about what he called an outrageous “conservation” surcharge tacked onto his bill. As it turned out, the $19.11 charge was not for water conservation, but for water waste.

Times staff writer Frederick M. Muir contributed to this story.