DWP's climate of patronage must change

When I first read the news last spring that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had named S. David Freeman as his deputy mayor for environmental and energy programs, I was sure that H. David Nahai's tenure as general manager at the city utility, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, would be short. Fast-forward to now: Nahai has resigned, and the mayor has proposed -- and the commission that oversees the DWP has approved -- Freeman, 83, to be the interim chief for six months.

Thus the political musical chairs in the DWP's executive suite continue. Dating back to the mid-1990s when Mayor Richard Riordan brought in a political pro, William McCarley, as the first non-engineer to head the city-run utility, there have been four chiefs, including Freeman.

Despite the obvious water infrastructure problems that have surfaced in recent weeks, to Nahai's credit, the agency he left abruptly last week is no worse off fiscally or operationally after his tenure than it was after Freeman's four publicity-seeking years as the utility's chief executive (1997-2001).

However, dating back to McCarley, the DWP has been eroded by over- politicization at the top. Although the giant utility will always be an economic development and environmental toy for the mayor and City Council members to play with, it should not be the political football it has increasingly become.

Nahai, for all of his professional credentials as a Century City lawyer and environmentalist, was first appointed to the DWP oversight board by the mayor in 2005 -- and as general manager two years later -- because he has been a successful fundraiser and active member of the Democratic Party generally and for the mayor in particular.

This political patronage needs to stop. And Freeman, himself a lifetime political appointee at all levels of government, needs to get a professional utility executive to head the cash-cow utility. That's the best service he could provide his politician boss.

The DWP has not been a model of transparency in the current management shuffle. Its oversight board called a special meeting Tuesday to deal with the changes, but held it in a Boyle Heights youth center away from the customary downtown boardroom. Although such meetings are public, they are usually also accessible through a teleconferencing hookup, but there was no such link this time. I would like to have heard the discussion about Nahai's exit and Freeman's return.