Spending Money Like It's Water at DWP

A good deal of what Nick Patsaouras told me Tuesday about the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which he oversees as a board member, is unfit to print. I don't have enough dashes, ellipses and brackets to convey his rage over the department's expenses, which include big bucks for lobbyists, writing teachers and, as if to send him over the edge, bottled water.

That's right, the company that pumps the water to your tap apparently doesn't always drink the stuff itself, as my colleague Patrick McGreevy reported.

Do they know something we don't?

During the same two-year period that the DWP forked out $1 million to convince us its tap water is top of the line, it also spent $31,160 for Sparkletts bottled water. It's like a McDonald's employee sneaking in lunch from Burger King.

If it had been Perrier instead of Sparkletts, I think Patsaouras might have gone into cardiac arrest.

"At the next meeting, I'm going to attack them on the water and this $500,000 brochure," he said, referring to the annual summary the agency sends out to let us know L.A.'s finest is safe to drink. "Why couldn't it be written in the bill we get every other month that our water meets federal standards? Do we have to have fancy stuff, a half-million dollars' worth?"

A half-million bucks is small potatoes in the context of a $4.3-billion budget -- a budget that will be going up now that the City Council has agreed to grant raises of at least 19% over five years to DWP members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. But this is the historically reckless DWP, where you could take all the small potatoes over the years and stack them higher than the Himalayas.

I had Patsaouras' name on my list of people to call this week even before the water story broke. He blew a gasket last month over the $2.2 million the water agency spends on lobbyists, while another board member wondered why a $465,000 contract with Aquila Fitness Consulting Systems was necessary. Patsaouras also wondered why the agency needed to spend $180,000 to teach employees how to write.

"How do they get in?" he wondered. If their job requires writing, why are they hired if they can't write?

I'm guessing it's the PR department that needs the remedial writing help. That might explain why, until two years ago, the water agency was spending $3 million a year on a politically connected PR firm -- whose former local manager is now under indictment for allegedly padding bills to the city -- despite having 14 employees in its own PR department.