Parks Vows to Freeze Rates

Mayoral candidate Bernard C. Parks pledged Wednesday to freeze water and power rates for four years and to tighten financial controls at the city’s Department of Water and Power.

Parks called for hiring an inspector general to monitor spending and contracting at the department. He cited “abuses” such as cost overruns on construction jobs and a steep rise in labor expenses.

“The current ratepayers are overburdened,” the South Los Angeles city councilman said outside DWP headquarters.

Parks also faulted fellow City Council members for using more than $600 million collected from DWP ratepayers to balance the city budget since 2001. But he made no pledge to stop the practice, saying only that officials should “wean ourselves” from ratepayer money.

Parks also said news reports and audits by city Controller Laura Chick have shown that DWP “is now considered just a cookie jar for the city of Los Angeles, where individuals merely stick their hand in the cookie jar and remove millions of dollars.”

A federal grand jury last month indicted a former executive at public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard for allegedly submitting -- along with unnamed other suspects -- at least $250,000 in false bills to the DWP.

Parks said he agreed with Mayor James K. Hahn that city residents were “victimized,” but added: “I think the mayor was involved in victimizing them. There’s no way the mayor did not know what Fleishman-Hillard was doing.”

“The mayor created an environment of corruption,” Parks said. “He benefited by it.”

DWP paid Fleishman-Hillard more than $400,000 for work to polish Hahn’s image, craft his responses to civic crises and develop policy initiatives, records show, but the indictment does not allege any link between that work and suspected overbilling.

Kam Kuwata, a senior advisor to Hahn’s reelection campaign, denied the mayor set a climate for corruption and noted that Chick approves all payments to Fleishman-Hillard.

If anything “fishy” occurred, “Laura Chick should have never paid those invoices,” he said. Chick responded: “Classic Jim Hahn: Blame everyone but himself. I asked him not to go forward with these millions of dollars in PR contracts, but he did.”