Results tagged “IBEW local 18” from Ron Kaye L.A.

The Dec. 8 runoff in Council District 2 between Paul Krekorian and Chris Essel shaped up as a choice between the lesser of two evils, both beholden the same City Hall political machine that for so long has betrayed the public trust and jeopardized the city's future.

Krekorian: Liberal Democrat owned by Hollywood, the Democrats and the SEIU
vs.
Essel: Business advocate owned by Hollywood, downtown developers and DWP's union, the IBEW.

With nearly 90 percent of the money spent in the primary to succeed Wendy Greuel in the East San Fernando Valley, they easily knocked off eight other candidates -- who unlike them actually lived in the district prior to the seat opening up.

It was a tossup, as far as I was concerned, between two decent, intelligent people who would do nothing to change the political dynamic at City Hall.

Then, on Wednesday, the election calculus changed.

IBEW union boss Brian D'Arcy escalated what was already a vicious and expensive campaign against Krekorian by suing the people who, against their will, have made his union members the wealthiest utility workers in California, if not the nation and the world.

D'Arcy isn't just greedy and selfish like most of the special interests who feed at the trough of City Hall. He's the closest thing to a truly evil force in city politics. He's someone who has shown utter contempt for the public interest for years, someone who has sabotaged every effort to replace the DWP's coal-burning power plants with renewable resources, someone who has blackmailed city officials into putting ratepayers money into staggering increases in wages and benefits while the water and power systems rotted.

Using the IBEW front group Working Californians -- the one that spent $800,000 in a failed attempt to pass Measure B in March so the union get rip off the billions of dollars that was supposed to buy solar energy -- D'Arcy went to court Wednesday to challenge the city's campaign financing law.

Maeve Reston in the LA Times reported that the legal challenge is to the 1985 city law that "bars political committees from accepting contributions of more than $500 if the group plans to use that money to make an independent expenditure for a city candidate.
 
"In practice, the law prevents outside groups or individuals from contributing to each other to pay for independent expenditures that support city candidates. Contributions that are not earmarked for a specific city campaign are not subject to that $500 limit. (If violations are suspected, the City Ethics Commission's enforcement division determines whether a contribution was for an independent expenditure)."

In other words, D'Arcy who has already spent nearly $100,000 in the runoff to elect Essel wants to lift all limits on what he can spend to buy the election outright. It's an indication that he has polls showing the race is close and winnable, which ought to wake up voters if anything will.

"They've been having a Mardi Gras (in City Hall) over the past three years." -- DWP union boss Brian D'Arcy on why IBEW members deserve a 3.25 % cash payment and raises up to 4 p% for the next few years while other city workers are losing money or getting nothing.

"Unlike us, they have the ability to strike. No. 2, when they go to management, management has the option of increasing the utility bills." -- Police union leader Paul Weber on why cops get no raises and lose overtime pay while IBEW workers get a lucrative new deal after getting  5.9 % raises the last two years.

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Your elected leaders from the mayor on down stood up and saluted the city's workers Friday as they approved a series of deals that fall $100 million short of balancing the budget four months into the fiscal year and leaves a $400 million deficit next year.

In the name of "shared sacrifice," the civilian workforce gave up raises in this year of 1.7 % deflation and agreed to temporary cuts that total a 4.4 percent lost of income.

The cops also gave up raises this year as well as agreeing to take time off instead of getting paid for overtime, a step that will cost thousands of officers a big chunk of their income.

The engineers union is being hit with the loss of a day's pay every two weeks through furloughs and the firefighters are at an impasses in their negotiations.

It's a different story at the Department of Water and Power.

D'Arcy hardly even had to raise the specter of a strike or threaten to retaliate against his bosses at every level to give him what he wants. He is no better than a hoodlum on the street putting a gun in your face and robbing you blind.

Not so, says the mayor. The lucrative agreement for D'Arcy "provides the shared sacrifice that the mayor has asked for," says his spokesman Matt Szabo.

Vital city services are being slashed and your utility bills will soon reflect what it costs to pay blackmail to D'Arcy and the DWP.

Rate hikes of 10 percent a year for the next five years already are planned but even that won't generate enough money.

The DWP Board of Commissioners will meet Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. to consider some important matters such as once again raising water rates and yet again giving union boss Brian D'Arcy's IBEW 8,000-plus members another sweetheart deal.

But you won't find out anything about those things by going to LADWP.com   (.com not .org as if it is a corporation, not a publicly-owned utility) and clicking on current agenda but it doesn't work.

Some things like the ripping off of the public for the benefit of the few like D'Arcy are best kept private. And that includes socking ratepayers to pay for handsome paydays for the nation's best paid utility workers even when the inflation rate is MINUS 1.7 percent and other city workers are deferring raises and taking time off without pay.

But secrets are hard to keep when you got a city of 4 million people enraged about the way things are going, particularly when it comes to paying more for less just to make some people richer. Here's the two items you can't find at LADWP.com

(23) Recommended by Chief Operating Officer and Chief Finanacial Officer
 (Approved by Acting General Manager)
Resolution recommending approval of Water Rates Ordinance
No.. 170435 to modify General Provision T Adjustment Factor
Limitations to increase the cap from $.50 per billing unit (one billing
union equals 748 gallons) to $1.00 per billing unit beginning April 1, 2010.
Council Approval by ordinance is required.
(24) c. Conference with Labor Negotiators.
Pursuant to California Government Code Section 54957.6, the Board
will meet in closed session with its labor negotiators (the Department's
Interim General Manager) with the following labor negotiations with the
following union representatives:
Local 18 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
(Local 18, IBEW)

Local 18, of course, is the union D'Arcy runs with the same sense of self-service he runs the DWP and chooses most city elected officials from the mayor and city controller on down.

His clout is so great that he deserves the lion's share of credit for finally ridding us of David Nahai as DWP general manager and bringing back his own favorite, David Freeman, as interim general manager -- the man who is doing the negotiating on the latest deal to pad the paychecks of the 95 percent of the workforce that are members of his union.

The agenda for Tuesday's board meeting also included initially measures to spike the pension of Chief Operating Officer Raman Raj -- another of D'Arcy's close allies -- and to funnel more than $1 million to a Sacramento lobbying firm that, like so many in the political arena, is trying to help out former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez in his time of need. 

I can't swear those two items made it from the tentative agenda to the final one since my sources are less concerned about a million here or there than the tens of millions represented by the rate hike and payoff to D'Arcy.

This is a watershed moment, so to speak, for the city.

If IBEW workers get raises when other city workers, including cops and firefighters, are giving up money, the labor unrest that will follow will bankrupt the city.

If water rates are increased even as power rates are sure to soar, tens of thousand of people soon will be paying more to the DWP than to their landlords or mortgage holders. And that will put them in the same bankrupt position as the city.

Costly in time and money as it is, it's my suggestion that we show up at the DWP shortly after noon on Tuesday and let them know the days of ripping off the public and letting the vital infrastructure of our water and power systems rot are over.

City Hall has used the DWP as a cash cow for too long. It has declared its intention to pack our utility with other city workers who's jobs are dispensable in these tough economic times, transfers that will actually mean they will get pay raises since the DWP pays 20 to 40 percent more for the same jobs than other city departments.

You can sit on your duff or feign ignorance but you will have nobody to blame but yourselves for letting them get away with these grand thefts.

"You say, 'We cut a deal with them.' Yeah, we did. We built a partnership with them...they didn't see any jobs."  -- Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in an interview with the LA Business Journal published Monday March 2, 2009.

That's what Charles Crumpley, the editor of the Business Journal, reports under the headline  *Mayor and Business a Poor Union.*

It's astonishing admission from the mayor, especially as it comes on the eve of an election when voters are being asked to write a blank check to the Department of Water and Power which has failed to deliver solar energy to the city despite the total failure of its three major solar initiatives over the last decade.

The reason for the failures: Its union, IBEW Local 18 under the leadership of Brian D'Arcy, sabotaged every effort to bring solar energy to the city because you don't need highly-paid DWP workers to install or maintain rooftop panels like you do the coal-burning power plants we depend on today more than any other city in the nation.

So instead of a well-planned solar energy program, the mayor and City Council give us Measure B that grants a monopoly on solar ownership, installation and maintenance to the DWP and creates jobs for IBEW workers.

It was written by D'Arcy who is spending his union's money freely to sell the charter amendment and elect Wendy Greuel as City Controller -- the official who is mandated to protect the billions of dollars in public money from being ripped off and squandered as ratepayers' money was previously when the DWP launched its solar programs 

As Crumpley reports the interview with the mayor:

"Villaraigosa did little at our meeting to dissuade the notion that he's in bed with labor unions. 
 
"He basically confirmed suspicions that Measure B, the issue on the ballot Tuesday to boost solar power in Los Angeles, was written to intentionally benefit the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union. 
 
"You say, 'We cut a deal with them.' Yeah, we did. We built a partnership with them," the mayor said. 
 
"His rationale: The politically powerful IBEW was against past solar power initiatives because "they didn't see any jobs." So Measure B was written to gain the union's help rather than its enmity."

Solar at any price -- that's the only argument that has been put forth by the environmental lobbyists, the DWP, and the City Hall machine.

The mayor's comments show the real reason:

We have to pay off D"Arcy's union so he will let us start using clean energy no matter what it costs us, no matter how long it takes.

This kind of appeasement of a union boss who has never cared about anything except his own self interest is the heart of what Measure B is about.

It's got nothing to do with clean energy. It's got nothing to do with clean air or closing our filthy coal-burning power plants. It's got nothing to do with good jobs.

It's just blackmail.

But we've exposed that and no matter what happens at the ballot box on Tuesday we're not letting go or giving up.

If we win,. we will offer to meet environmentalists, the solar energy industry, the unions including the IBEW, the DWP and all the various interests who have a stake in the outcome and work to develop a real plan for clean energy and good jobs.

If we lose, we will demand the same summit meeting.

There is only one goal: Clean energy and good jobs at the lowest cost in the fastest time.

That's what they don't understand. We really want that for the benefit of the city, not for the benefit of narrow special interests. 

What is there to say?

You're living in fear of losing your job. You can't afford the soaring costs of gas or food. Your neighbor just lost his house and you wonder how much longer you can keep up with your mortgage. You've got no pension and your 401k is shrinking faster than you put money into it. Your kid's school is rotten and you're worried about what the future will hold for your family.

Then you find out that all those rate hikes you're paying for water and power are going straight into the paychecks of 8,500 DWP workers who average nearly $80,000 a year already and never have to worry about losing their jobs or their pensions worth 75 percent of their salaries.

And on Oct. 1, they're getting another 6 percent raise compliments of a sweetheart contract granted them by the people who take a solemn oath to serve you and protect your interests.

I can't really say you elected them since the mayor and City Council were really put into office by special interests and the biggest and powerful of those interest is Brian D'Arcy, the business manager/financial secretary of Local 18, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

You can Google and search all you want but you won't find many pictures or quotes from D'Arcy in the public record.

He doesn't need the public; he owns the public's representatives and they tremble at the thought of crossing him as if their lives or at least their careers would be at risk if they crossed hiim.

That's how he got a five-year contract in 2005 for his workers (which includes almost everyone at DWP except the top tier of executives) that provided 3.25 percent annual pay increases with an escalator clause that could lift that to 6 percent depending on inflation

This is the year when the escalator clause kicked in with a vengeance because of the high cost of fuel and food -- the year when massive rate hikes were imposed to fix the water and power infrastructure that was allowed to deteriorate because so much money was going into DWP salaries and benefits and being transfered to the city general fund so the rest of the workforce could keep pace.

Kerry Cavanaugh in the Daily News puts the actual raise this year at 5.9 percent, much of it not budgeted, and notes pointedly that D'Arcy and other officials of the IBEW "did not return calls."   

And why should they? Does the thief call up and say thank you? Is D'Arcy going to heed the pleas of Soledad Garcia, the San Pedro community activist who heads the DWP Oversight Committee to "take pity on the ratepayers."

That isn't going to happen anymore than Antonio Villaraigosa is going to invoke the "reopener" clause in the IBEW contract and demand D'Arcy go back to the bargaining table because 5.9 percent raises are outrageous and unaffordable.

Instead, the mayor offered hollow reassurances that money from rates will only go for infrastructure improvements as promised -- just like the money from trash fee hikes would only go to hire more police officers.

You know by now that a promise from the mayor is meaningless.

So the question is what are you going to do about?

Probably nothing.

You'll do what you've done for years, you'll grumble and go on being robbed by the city day after day, year after year, hiding behind apathy and defeatism as your neighborhood gets worse and traffic gets worse and your employer relocates to Arizona or Oregon and then you'll try to sell your house and find out it's worth less than you paid for it.

There is an alternative.

You could stop being a patsy. Thousands of people across the city are fighting back and in small ways they're beginning to make a difference. The politicians might be scared to death of people like Brian D'Arcy but like all bullies, he'll run for cover if enough people join together and stand up to him and the cowards at City Hall.