DWP Contracts and the Facts of Life
The Times’ editorial suggests that Mayor James K. Hahn has plenty of reasons to fire [DWP acting General Manager] Frank Salas (“Dept. of Waste and Power,” July 16). When is The Times going to get real?
Your news articles are full of innuendoes that the loosie-goosie contract with Fleishman-Hillard was nothing more than a payback for its campaign contributions.
Because of the connections between the mayor and Fleishman-Hillard, it would have been career suicide for Salas to have tried to be a tough administrator on that contract.
I always hated such contracts when I was a department head at DWP because it is impossible to detect overbilling on professional service contracts where the billings are for hours of work performed at the office of the contractor.
The city has many such contracts for engineering and legal services. The city needs to have the flexibility to contract for these types of services because there are many specialized services that are totally impractical to maintain in-house.
Larry McReynolds
La Crescenta
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