Chick Will Await Panel’s Findings on Water Rates

Although high water rates seem to be the dominant issue for her constituents, Councilwoman Laura Chick said she will suspend judgment over the fairness of current rates until she reviews the findings of a citizens panel.

She made the announcement Thursday at a meeting of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization.

“What I’m hearing is that the rates are extremely burdensome,” Chick said after the meeting. “But we might discover that there is not a more equitable way of doing it.”

Mayor Richard Riordan plans to reconvene a panel appointed by former Mayor Tom Bradley that advised the city on setting current water rates. The Blue Ribbon Committee on Water Rate Restructuring is expected to meet Oct. 14. Four San Fernando Valley residents were recently added to the 17-member body.

The subject dominated her first formal meeting with the homeowner group since she was elected in November. About 100 members were on hand for the meeting.

Several of the residents, rankled by the reported costs of a recent nine-day strike by Department of Water and Power workers, asked what was being done to reform the powerful agency.

Chick said she has already sponsored a motion that would require city officials to draft guidelines for responding to future strikes at the DWP and other departments. And the DWP’s nearly coincidental requests for pay raises and rate increases, she said, amounted to department officials “thumbing their noses” at the City Council.

Without elaborating, she said there would be “major changes” within the semiautonomous department.