Bye, Bye Nahai: How Antonio's attempt to politicize the DWP went wrong

To a great extent, the history and development of L.A. is tied tightly to the Department of Water and Power.

From the days of William Mulholland and the takeover of the San Fernando Valley by the Chandler family and their pals and the "Chinatown" era through the formation of pubic employee unions to efforts at overdevelopment today, the DWP is at the heart of much of the story of how money and power have operated.

It's in that context that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa politicized the city's monopoly utility last December with the appointment of David Nahai as general manager and Raman Raj as chief operating officer. Nahai, as DWP commission president, had established his obedience while Raj had proved his loyalty to Villaraigosa and his close ally, DWP union president Brian D'Arcy, so well that he was fired from the utility back in 2001 because of it.

Back in December, the mayor was pushing for another round of water and power rate hikes. The DWP had become a cash cow for the city and the mayor needed cash.

The first sign of where his administration was going came early on when he could have rejected a contracted with D'Arcy's IBEW that contained an inflation escalator clause that could give the utility's highly-paid workers raises of up to 6 percent a year. So more money was needed to pay that bill, to fix the power system that was plagued by blackouts and to deal with a looming water shortage caused by plans to densify the city.            .

Nahai came in saying all the right things. He pledged "unprecedented transparency," according to a Daily News article at the time, in how the rate hikes would be spent, including an oversight committee to track the money.

"The people of Los Angeles deserve, and are entitled to, accountability," Nahai proclaimed.

It was the first of many incidents where Nahai showed a propensity to tell people what they wanted to hear regardless of the truth.

The truth was that early on he put representatives of Neighborhood Councils in their place. The NCs had negotiated a deal with DWP officials previously that gave them an oversight role but when they tried to exercise that authority with Nahai, he made it clear he would deal with the letter of the deal but not its spirit of citizen oversight and civic engagement.

There was nothing transparent in how DWP money was being spent in Nahai's promise to put $152,000 of public money into Raj's pension fund account -- a secret deal that only just came out and led to an explosion that made them both renounce the deal. And then there are the contracts DWP approved with Raj's former clients -- contracts the mayor said should be rejected last night.

Along the way, there was the embarrassment caused by the disclosure that Nahai's boasts of being a "green" champion were not true personally.He was exposed as a spectacular user of water and power at his hillside mansion even as he pushed ahead at full speed with a toilet-to-tap water recycling program for others and demanding stricter conservation measures.

He promised rate hikes would go to infrastructure improvements but budgeted to put 1,000 more employees on his payroll -- and on the IBEW's union membership lists. And he came up with $150,000 to hire Cindy Montanez as a part-timer to please the City Hall political machine.

Now Nahai stands alone.

He has been undercut by the mayor, humiliated by the city controller and besieged by City Council member.

His hubris and glib looseness with the truth, his concealment of critical information from the DWP Commission and his contempt for oversight by neighborhood councils show what a huge miscalculation Villaraigosa made.

It won't be long before Nahai is gone and Raj with him The important question is how can the public protect itself from another attempt to politicize the DWP and put in place a management team that is competent, operates openly and honestly and serves the interests of the people and not the politicians.