Mayor Puts Israel Trip on Hold

Amid criticism over excessive spending by the Department of Water and Power, Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn has postponed plans to lead a delegation to Israel that city officials considered financing in part with DWP money.

The mayor’s office had been planning a July trip. Deputy Mayor Julie Wong said Hahn had hoped to discuss trade and security issues with Israeli officials.

But earlier this week, his office canceled the plans.

“It was premature.... We’re still working things out,” Wong said, declining to provide more details about why the decision was made.

Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, Western regional director of the American Jewish Committee, said Hahn called him Tuesday to say that city business -- including the ongoing debate about the mayor’s controversial plan to modernize Los Angeles International Airport -- would make leaving the country difficult.

Greenebaum said the committee invited Hahn to go to Israel shortly after he was elected in 2001. The mayor already postponed an earlier trip to Israel amid debate about how state budget cuts would affect the city’s finances.

This time, the use of DWP funds, which senior city officials said was being contemplated by the mayor, could have been embarrassing so soon after Hahn pushed a hike in water rates.

Councilman Dennis Zine said Wednesday that having the DWP pay for city officials to study Israeli water security systems was “a far stretch.”

The City Council raised residential water rates 11% earlier this month in the midst of criticism that the DWP was wasting millions of dollars on public relations, much of it going to Fleishman-Hillard Inc., a giant public relations firm with close ties to Hahn.

Fleishman-Hillard’s DWP contract, which costs $3 million a year, has come under scrutiny in criminal probes into city contracting.

DWP officials declined to comment on how much the agency would have paid for the Israel trip, referring all inquiries to the mayor’s office.

Wong would not discuss how the mayor had planned to pay for the trip, saying that the financing had not been finalized.

Meanwhile, other traveling city officials forced the delay of several actions that had been scheduled for a vote before the Harbor Commission.

Harbor Commissioner Thomas Warren and Al Fierstine, the port’s director of business development, are in Vietnam at a conference put on by an association of Asian port executives. That trip is budgeted to cost $23,400, according to the harbor department.

In addition, port Executive Director Larry Keller and Commissioner Elwood Lui are in Dalian, China, to sign a sister port friendship agreement with harbor officials in that city. That trip is budgeted to cost $20,400.

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Times staff writer Jessica Garrison contributed to this report.