Three months ago, Los Angeles' plan for a $3-billion solar energy installation seemed like it had come out of nowhere, with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and seven City Council members saying they needed to act quickly to get it on the March 3 ballot.
With events moving so rapidly, Department of Water and Power General Manager H. David Nahai told the council that he couldn't give voters a financial analysis of the plan -- including its effect on electricity rates -- until this month, four weeks before the election.
Yet documents obtained by The Times show that Nahai began discussing the solar plan with proponents nearly a year ago and had requested financial information from the DWP employee union that conceived the idea.
Nahai sent his No. 2 executive to a Feb. 29, 2008, briefing where, according to meeting minutes obtained through a public records request, union officials proposed the idea of a ballot measure and presented polling data showing it would secure support from two-thirds of voters.
Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who has called the DWP's public information effort on the solar plan "abysmal," said she was unaware of the 12-month-old briefing.
Councilman Greig Smith said he regrets having voted to put the issue on the ballot in such haste -- and questioned why the mayor's office was in such a hurry in the first place.
"For some reason, they decided to wait until the last minute to take it to the council, probably because they thought they could slip it through without the facts, which they did," said Smith, who now opposes the measure.
Villaraigosa spokeswoman Parita Shah noted Friday that the proposal -- now known as Measure B -- was approved unanimously "after an open and public process."
Nahai, in turn, defended his handling of the solar plan, saying that he did not know with certainty until late September that the mayor and Working Californians -- an advocacy group linked to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the DWP's employee union -- had decided to pursue the ballot measure.
Nahai said he had been working over the last year on a much larger solar plan that included the proposal for DWP-owned panels.
Because the plan changed repeatedly until Nov. 7, the day the council put it on the ballot, there was no way to prepare an accurate analysis, Nahai said. "A fiscal analysis would have been meaningless had we done it before" the final draft was adopted, he added. "What would we have analyzed?"
