The DWP: Time for a postelection makeover

The Department of Water and Power has been taking it in the shorts during the mayoral campaign -- some casual visitor might assume that the DWP is on the ballot.

Wendy Greuel’s single biggest source of campaign support has been nearly $1.5 million from DWP workers and union members, some of whom are getting six-figure salaries and nice juicy raises that their brethren in City Hall down the hill can only dream of.

And Eric Garcetti’s campaign and supporters have not been shy about making this a campaign issue.

ENDORSEMENTS: Los Angeles City Elections 2013

The last 20 years or so of DWP history have been flashy and splashy, tales of jets chartered to give politicians tours of the DWP’s far-flung power sources, and sundry parties and perks. In 1993, nearly 300 DWP managers stepped in to cover for striking workers and managed, over nine days, to spend $800,000 on catered food. And in a Greek-drama turn on that hubris, some of them got food poisoning. DWP ratepayers also paid for the more sinister work of the DWP’s videotaping of strikers’ picket lines.

However long or short the leash on the PR people working at the stylish 1961 “corporate international style” DWP headquarters, the executives calling the shots at the DWP have sometimes come across as clueless and tone deaf to the fact that this isn’t 1961 anymore.

And yet the millions of customers whose electricity and water, and the bills for them, come from the DWP -- the people of the city of L.A. -- still pay some of the lowest rates in California, lower in some cases by double digits.

The DWP is the nation’s largest municipal utility. It is a proprietary department of the city, like the harbor, operating more or less autonomously with its own budget and paying a kind of tribute -- something around 5% of its profit -- to the city coffers, and using the rest to keep rates low and, best-case scenario, to keep the system in repair.

The “W” part of DWP was created about 100 years ago because the city’s private water systems were corrupt and inept, and more devoted to delivering dividends to stockholders than delivering water to Angelenos. Not that the DWP’s grand scheme that sucked water out of Owens Valley into the city of L.A. was exactly on the up and up.

In the 19th century, the city had had a close call; in 1868, the frustrated City Council voted to auction the city’s water system to the highest bidder. But one of the city’s last Latino mayors, Cristobal Aguilar, vetoed that, and made the future DWP possible.

The “P” part began in 1917, and has not only kept electricity rates lower than those paid by customers of companies like PG&E;, and of municipal utilities in places like Pasadena and Burbank, but has kept the power switched on for customers even during deregulation and the massive blackouts of a dozen years ago. The DWP ginned up so much power during the blackouts that it sold the surplus to private companies supplying other Californians -- at a profit margin that made even some city officials cringe at accusations that the DWP was gouging.

So successful have public utilities been at keeping rates down that, as the New York Times reports, some cities and states are thinking about creating or re-creating public utilities. Cities like Boulder, Colo., and Minneapolis are hoping that muni utilities can use local control to switch from coal to cleaner power sources, to take advantage of nonprofit models and tax-exempt financing, no federal corporate income tax or big corporate salaries, to keep a lid on costs while keeping the lights on and the water flowing.

2013 is the 100th anniversary of the L.A. aqueduct, and it’s a great opportunity. Angelenos need to be wise enough to separate the utility itself from the employees who can act like the DWP is both piggybank and party central.

A more repentant DWP and a new mayor can make the case to Angelenos that theirs are artificially low rates, that it’s time to pay for repairing those 100-year-old pipes that break and flood canyon roads and big intersections, to pay for the green energy conversion that will leave the city with cleaner and more reliable energy, just as the banning of backyard incinerators some 50 years ago in favor of more curbside trash pickups left the city with healthier lungs and bluer skies.

After election day, once all the campaign mailers are consigned to the recycling bin -- you are recycling them, aren’t you? -- it’s time for Los Angeles to take another long look at the DWP and what its mission is meant to be.

Flip around that cliche: Don’t throw out the clean bathwater of the DWP along with the big babies who are milking it.

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