Austin Beutner got a pound of the City Council’s flesh Wednesday but it cost DWP ratepayers $600,000.
The bills were for consultants the Council used last spring to fight the mayor’s effort to
impose electricity rate hikes of up to 28 percent. but the spending was never authorized until long after the fact and tasks performed were at best “vague and generic,” the First Deputy Mayor and interim DWP General Manager wrote his Board of Commissioners (ladwp–paconsult.pdf).
Beutner’s six-page letter supported by 246 pages of documents amounts to a scathing indictment of how the Council operates from a political agenda without regard to the public’s money, legal requirements and good business practices.
It is a window into how come City Hall with nearly $7 billion in revenue annually has dug itself into a financial hole so drastuc that only deep cuts in services and staffing — or bankruptcy — can ever save it.
Clearly, the buck-a-year de facto mayor has not been wasting his time. What’s not clear is whether the Council has learned just how dangerous someone is who is smart, independent and an expert in financial matters.
Back in January, the DWP agreed to pay PA Consulting $250,000 for past and current services in support of increasing the Energy Cost Adjustment Factor, the utility’s back door way of raising power rates without seeking Council approval.
Within a month, the Council started assigning tasks to the consultants without authority or proper financial controls. When war broke out between the Council and DWP in March, the bills started soaring with individual consultants getting up to $535 an hour and teams of consultants billing up to $1,700 an hour.
But it wasn’t until late May that the Council got around to passing a motion for PA Consulting to be paid $600,000 extra for its services with DWP paying the bills, an action that the Council has no authority to impost.
“The $600,000 was for services PA Consulting had already performed, before any contract amendment authorizing the services above the $250,000 cap was authorized by City Council…That amendment increased the amount allocated for the ECAF report from $86,500 to $493,000 and the amount allocated for the presentation and responses to government officials from $22,000 to $272,000 – a more than ten-fold increase,” Beutner said in his letter.
Even after that, the Council spending spree continued.
“”This additional work increases the total bills from PA Consulting to over $1 million — a 400 percent increase above the amount authorized by the Board,”
What really galled Beutner is that the “question of who initially
authorized PA Consulting to perform work above the $250,000 limit and
what the scope of that work was, remains unknown to the LADWP and
unanswered by the CLA (Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller).”.
Over and over, Beutner raises the same concern without getting answers:
“Who authorized the level of expenditures incurred in the agreement?
“What services were requested from the PA Consulting Group?
“Whether all of the services requested from the PA Consulting Group had
been completed?
“Who authorized the services provided in the agreement?
“Who authorized the level of expenditures incurred in the agreement?
“Who was the contract administrator?”
It’s a mystery and so is much of the work PA did because of “invoices for
consultant time which did not provide any tasks description.“
“The
total amount of time billed on the invoices without a task description
was more than $260,000. Subsequent submissions provided task
descriptions although the vast majority of the descriptions were vague
and generic,” Beutner said.
“The LADWP is not in a position to
answer questions pertaining to the hourly rates charged by PA
Consulting or the staffing levels authorized by the CAO (City
Administrative Officer Miguel Santana) and CLA. Billing rates for the PA
Consulting staff were as high as $535 per hour.
“Additionally, the contract’s task requirements provided that PA Consulting would have
at least three consultants present at City Council, Board, and Stakeholder presentation
meetings. The same requirement applied with respect to meetings and briefing with the
Mayor and City Council staff meetings.”
Obedient
as always, the Board of Commissioners had little to say as they signed
off on paying the $600,000 except for Jonathan Parfrey who found the
only thing worthy of comment was that it cost more than $1,000 for PA to
meet with Neighborhood Council leaders.
Why would anyone waste one-tenth of 1 percent of the $1 million in bills on those pesky Neighborhood Council types who only get in the way of really
important people like Parfrey, the environmental green-washer who feeds
at the same trough as the Council and so many commissioners overseeing
so many departments?
Parfrey’s delight was enhanced when learned later in the meeting that those same little
people are paying $60 million to subsidize water and power service to 100,000
more households that have been added to the DWP’s low-income program that will soon include nearly a fifth of its customers.
Beutner
wasn’t there to see his smug performance since the man virtually
running the city has better things to do than waste hours watching the
rubber-stamping of decisions that get no scrutiny.
That’s the
question this episode raises: How can a system that is so incestuous, so
out of control, so indifferent to the public interest and the value of
the public’s money, actually be fixed without new leadership and a new
structure of governance?
The Council did intentionally humiliate DWP’s Freeman as well as Beutner, when they both made it into Council 1-2 weeks ago along wit Szabo.
You chose to ignore that the castigation of DWP was not over why it hadn’t been able to budget for fixing the bursting pipes, sewers and power lines or clearing all the surrounding brush. But over why DWP didn’t fork over all the money the council wanted into the general fund to help cover up its own mismanagement and going broke. For reasons having little to do with DWP.
Smith’s the only one who saw it as the grandstanding it was and pointed out that the blame game was unseemly and getting them nowhere, that the Council had its share of blame too in not taking a more pro-active stance – but it’s Smith who was taken to task on blogs like this and Paul Hatfield.
You all scream for Jan Perry’s head because she dared expose Trutanich for not knowing what he’s bellowing about over AEG, but LOVED how she humiliated Szabo as representing the Mayor’s office and this blog couldn’t praise her enough just for humiliating someone else you love to hate. You all vilified Nahai, Freeman and then Beutner whatever they did/ do. Just because.
Well Beutner gets his revenge by proving Smith more right than he intended, so now you like him. Like you liked Jan Perry, for humiliating Szabo. We can rest easy that this won’t last and you’ll go back to hating Beutner, Perry and company tomorrow.
This bold move of his does give hope, however, that the Council had also better watch itself, cut the empty finger-pointing grandstanding to deflect blame, and take a more pro-active stance.
Meanwhile, who’s even thinking about fixing those pipes, sewers, power lines, with all this distraction and fingerpointing?
Does PA Consulting stand for Pals of Antonio?
This wheeling-and-deal in the hundreds of thousands of dollars as if it were mere chump change smacks of the City of Bell. Someone! Anyone! Bring on the real investigations!
Beutner gave us the developer’s whore Michael LoGrande in a dummed down department that did not need a Director as one. Don’t care what Beutner does after this. He will always be an ass.
Do we have a sunset clause on Beutner’s contract, or does he get to stay forever, cause he collects only a buck. He will end up costing the city millions before he is done. This is nonsense. Since when did lack of pay give someone more clout and a license to do whatever he pleases. I’ll work for 50 cents, if I can get that opportunity to remake the city in my own image, and I’m smarter than him, cause I made my money the honest way.
If the Mayor and his henchman Beutner simply evaporated, the city would be on its way to healing. The Mayor is the PROBLEM, a fool, who no longer has any idea why he is in City Hall or what to do next. The only idea he has is that more development is good for the city, most of it funded by taxpayer dollars that are never repaid. If he was serious about turning this city around, he’d collect the brightest and smartest citizens who know and care about the city. Instead we have a billionaire, Beutner, running the city, as though being rich gives you an insight, knowledge or soul on doing the right thing. Everything Beutner has done so far stinks to high heavens.