February 2010 Archives

EDITOR'S NOTE: Read the consultant's report recommending massive DWP electricity rate hikes at OurLA.org.

You don't know nothing if you didn't know this was coming: Massive DWP rate hikes.

How else did you think they were going bail out the sinking ship of the city except by socking it to you?

It's all been a setup, planned for a long time and now it's being executed: 800 percent increase in the "energy cost adjustment factor" pass-through on April 1, 20 percent increase in the next 12 months, 33 percent with last year included.

And from there, you can be 100 percent certain your power rates will keep going up and away, doubled and tripled.

You are sitting in the DWP's electric chair and they are about to pull the switch. I've been telling you this was coming for months so don't be shocked when your electricity bill soars higher than your mortgage.

Don't kid yourselves: It's the people who have mortgages that are paying the bulk of these rate hikes.

They jiggled the rate tiers to punish the 40 percent of residents who live in single family homes while keeping bills low for most apartment dwellers and tripling the number of customers with heavy subsidies to 250,000 households - a sixth of DWP's customers.

They squandered tens of millions of dollars pretending to go green but have the worst renewable energy portfolio in the state so they are desperate to buy wind and solar power from anybody who has some no matter what it costs to meet the 20 percent goal mandated by the state by the end of this year.

They have painted themselves into a corner and don't know any other way except to slug it to the middle class, from those just getting by on two family incomes to those in the upper middle class who have seen their wealth decline sharply and their incomes fall.

This is their cockeyed theory of municipal socialism laid bare, a redistribution of wealth that gives pennies to the poor and feeds the insider culture that has feasted so long on the public treasury.

The DWP is the city's cash cow. It has hired 1,400 workers since the recession began and now has transferred 300 city workers facing layoffs to its payroll with most of them getting raises of 20 to 40 percent.

When other city workers gave up raises, City Hall rewarded DWP employees with 3.25 percent lump sum cash payments and guaranteed them raises of up to 4 percent for the following four years - raises for people who already are the highest paid utility workers in the nation.

Somebody has got to pay the bills for all this featherbedding and over-indulgence, and that's you.

Somebody has got to pay for all these sweetheart contracts for contractors, consultants and power purchases, and that's you.

Somebody has got to pay the bills to rebuild the water and power infrastructure that is bursting and blowing up from neglect while they put the money into the pockets of workers and insiders, and that's you.

And every time you pay more, don't forget that nearly 20 percent of your money goes straight into the general fund to bail out City Hall from its deficits that total billions of dollars and are going up every week by millions of dollars.

Somebody has got to pay, alright. I say make them pay. If you want to help me do that, go up to the right-hand column of this page and see how you can donate to OurLA.org, my non-profit community news and networking site so I can hire a reporter who will work full-time to penetrate the secrecy of the DWP and expose where your money is really going.

Or you can just get used to paying more and more of your hard-earned money for less and less.

The long-awaited consulting report on pass-through electricity charges was released Friday, calling for an immediate 800 percent increase in the energy cost adjustment factor and increases every quarter that will raise overall power rates by more than 20 percent within a year.

The massive increases are being sought as DWP officials face intense pressure to have a revenue sream to be able to lose at least four deals to buy solar and wind energy to meet the stand-mandated goal of 20 percent renewable energy by the end of this calendar year.

For the year ending June 2009, the residential rate was 11.8 cents.

For the year ending June 2010, the residential rate per the budget is projected to be 13.1 cents.

A 2.7 cent increase is a 20.6% increase based off of the 2010 number, or 22.9% off of the 2009 number.

If you add the 2.7 cent increase to the 13.1, you arrive at 15.8 cents -- a 33.9% increase over the 2009 rate.

Click here for the full report by PA Consulting.

(Editor's Note: This article was submitted to the LA Times Opinion Page Editor a week ago but still has not gotten a response rejecting or accepting it, so it's yours for free)

To paraphrase President Obama in his State of the Union speech, democracy in a city of four million people can be noisy and messy and complicated.

That was evident this (last) week in Los Angeles in a way that we have rarely seen as people from all over the city, from all walks of life, paraded before the City Council to plead their case for their jobs, for funding for their causes, for understanding of their needs.

It was noisy and messy and surely the financial and spiritual crisis facing the city is complicated.

But the earnestness and passion of the disabled, of neighborhood activists, of environmentalists, of city workers, of lovers of art and culture, of youth, of the LGBT community and so many others was a demonstration of the underlying vitality of the people and their yearning for a city that works for them.

Their energy is the fertile ground on which great cities grow. It is the grassroots of democracy, a complex web of often competing needs, values and interests that, if nurtured, can bloom into a community enriched by their diversity.

It's the nurturing that's the problem in Los Angeles and always has been.

This is a city that throughout its history has been run from the top down by elites that have looked down at those below and patronizingly decided what was best for them and, of course, for themselves.

The Times in its editorial on the outcry of so many people before the Council expressed this noblesse oblige attitude by chiding them for thinking only of themselves when the city is in dire straits, having started the "new fiscal year -- irresponsibly and, more to the point, illegally -- in debt and insolvent."

The editorial suggests that a "successful" Los Angeles rely on private fund-raising and volunteerism as a "model for providing quality-of-life programs instead of support from the city.

With that, the Times gives a blanket endorsement to the proposal to restructure city government, eliminate thousands of city workers who provide services to the public and drastically reduce funding for programs like Neighborhood Councils, human services and arts and culture.

The irony is that most of the money for these efforts does come from donations and most of the work is done by thousands or ordinary people volunteering endless hours in the service of others and their communities.

City government should be in a support role for these efforts but more often than not, it is the obstacle in their way.

Instead of bringing this vast army of volunteers to the table of power and working with them to integrate their efforts with available resources, the city has brushed them off with little more than lip service.

City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana in his meticulously detailed reports to the Council and mayor demonstrated that overspending and poor management over many years has brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy.

In his public comments to the Council, he warned that his three-year plan to slash spending, reorganize the bureaucracy and sell valuable city assets is just the beginning.

The impact of the recession and the city's financial crisis is likely to last seven to 10 years, he said, and more cuts in funding and more job eliminations are inevitable.

There is no way out of this crisis without the good will of the people and that is what is missing.

The people have lost confidence in City Hall. The hundreds of people who have gone to City Hall to beg for mercy for their causes are fed up with begging for crumbs. They are demanding a full role in developing the policies and implementing the programs they care so passionately about.

It's a noisy, messy and complicated way to do business. It's called democracy, an idea that is alien to the civic and political culture of Los Angeles. But it's an idea whose time has come.

And it's the only way out of this crisis, the only way the city can pull together and flourish for years to come.