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The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power announced Tuesday that it has shelved plans for a 970-acre solar farm near the Salton Sea, just as members of the City Council signaled that they were unprepared to support the project. The DWP's interim general manager, S. David Freeman, said he was troubled by the costs of the 55-megawatt project, which had been slated to go up on land purchased by the utility in 2006. Freeman made his comments moments after Councilwoman Jan Perry, who heads the council's Energy and the Environment Committee, said she planned to send the solar project back to the DWP for more work.

Privacy issues Re "Cyber security overkill," Editorial, April 24 The Times expressed the same concerns I have with the cyber security legislation the House will consider Thursday. It is imperative that we balance our desire for security with our right to privacy. That is why I'm working across the aisle, with Republican Rob Woodall of Georgia, to make it easier for Americans to bring legal action against the federal government if it uses personal information in a negligent manner.

Storm clouds hovered over the San Fernando Valley, but businessman Jack Engel was smiling as he pointed to a row of solar inverters at one of two commercial warehouses he owns in Sun Valley. Power was being generated despite the weather, no problem. His problem, he said, has been the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. "I like the idea of solar, but unfortunately my experience is that the DWP doesn't support it," said Engel, who has run a small manufacturing firm on Pendleton Street for four decades.

Storm clouds hovered over the San Fernando Valley, but businessman Jack Engel was smiling as he pointed to a row of solar inverters at one of two commercial warehouses he owns in Sun Valley. Power was being generated despite the weather, no problem. His problem, he said, has been the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. "I like the idea of solar, but unfortunately my experience is that the DWP doesn't support it," said Engel, who has run a small manufacturing firm on Pendleton Street for four decades.

News item: Utility head takes demotion to retire with larger bonus (March 11). Now I know what DWP stands for: Depart With Payola. IRA NICKERSON Studio City

Among the dozen measures the City Council hoped to put to voters on the March 8 ballot was one that would allow it to fire the general manager of the Department of Water and Power and the commissioners to whom he ostensibly reports. To do so, however, they needed the approval of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who vetoed it instead. On Wednesday, as council members meet the mayor's new nominee to run the department, they will try to muster the 10 votes they need to override. Even the measure's chief backer, Councilwoman Jan Perry, expects the effort to fall short.

'Nothing's going on here," Board of Water and Power Commissioners President Lee Kanon Alpert insisted at Tuesday's meeting, sounding woefully similar to a certain Wizard urging Dorothy and friends not to peek behind the curtain. Alpert's intent was to convince onlookers that there was nothing nefarious about plans by the Department of Water and Power to pay its outgoing chief, H. David Nahai, his full salary through the end of the year in exchange for "consulting" services. After all, Alpert said, smaller city departments have made similar deals with departing executives for even longer terms.

One of the exasperating facts of contemporary Los Angeles politics is that City Hall is beset with problems, but its critics are often as misguided as its culprits. That's certainly true when it comes to the Department of Water and Power. In the recent City Council elections, a number of challengers — and incumbents — argued that the DWP is a cesspool of overspending and that the utility's excessive electricity rates stiff consumers to prop up a bloated city bureaucracy. Persuaded, city voters approved two measures intended to rein in the DWP, including the creation of a ratepayer advocate.

Until further notice, it might be wise to carry a life preserver with you at all times in Greater Los Angeles, which had yet another water main eruption early Tuesday. It's like a geyser park out there, and fittingly, the latest gusher was near an L.A. Department of Water and Power distribution station in South Los Angeles. Where and when will the next one blow? I'm visualizing a news conference at which Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tries to explain the DWP's latest troubles or persuade us he can avert a city budget disaster, and suddenly he's shooting skyward, riding a gusher.

Does the Department of Water and Power need more oversight? The recent and perhaps continuing showdown over electricity rate increases suggests that it does. The city owns the utility, but it's still hard for City Council members or the public to get accurate and consistent information on the department's finances, plans and practices. The problem has been exacerbated by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's fumbling attempt to impose a carbon surcharge, supposedly to begin a serious transition from burning dirty coal to relying instead on renewable energy.

As utility crews raced Tuesday to repair six water main breaks that stretched from the Hollywood Freeway on the east to La Cienega Boulevard on the west, the general manager of the Department of Water and Power stood before the agency's Board of Commissioners and requested a series of steep rate increases over the next two years. Ron Nichols, who first argued for increases last summer, said a 5% water rate hike and a 10.5% electrical hike over two years were critical if the department hoped to comply with environmental mandates, renovate its coastal power plants and accelerate the replacement of water mains throughout the city.

Silver Lake residents can't wait for this construction job to bite the dust. More than two dozen residents living along the path of a $40-million water pipe project say they are suffering respiratory problems from particulate matter stirred up by construction trucks and heavy-duty trenching machines. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is replacing a massive neighborhood water conduit as part of a larger, federally mandated plan to retire the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe reservoirs, which are exposed to airborne contaminants.

Two more golden eagles have been found dead at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wind farm in the Tehachapi Mountains, for a total of eight carcasses of the federally protected raptors found at the site. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to determine the cause of death of the two golden eagles found Sunday at the Pine Tree wind farm, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles and 15 miles northeast of Mojave, said Lois Grunwald, a spokeswoman for the agency. The agency has determined that the six golden eagles found dead earlier at the 2-year-old wind farm in Kern County were struck by blades from some of the 90 turbines spread across 8,000 acres at the site.

It was the simple beauty of the sagebrush hills and the first-rate fishing that drew Vince Salvato here 15 years ago. "All I wanted was a quiet, pristine place with clean air," he said, sipping sarsaparilla inside Bronco Bobbi's curio shop in this tiny town in southern Utah. "That's why I came here. " But the tranquillity has been broken by the day-and-night rumble of trucks ferrying coal from a strip mine near Bryce Canyon National Park to a power plant three hours to the north.

After nearly a year of delays, the Los Angeles City Council has appointed an independent representative to scrutinize proposed hikes in water and electricity bills. Frederick Pickel, a 59-year-old energy consultant, was unanimously voted in as the city's first ratepayer advocate, a position created by voters early last year amid concern over rising utility costs. His annual salary will be $236,758. The public now has "somebody on our side" when the Department of Water and Power asks for rate increases, Councilman Eric Garcetti said before the vote.

Los Angeles energy consultant Frederick H. Pickel was nominated Tuesday as the first ratepayer advocate to oversee proposed customer rate hikes at the city's Department of Water and Power. In a letter obtained by The Times, sent hours before a search panel was scheduled to announce its choice for the voter-created position, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa informed Pickel that city officials must "move quickly" on proposed increases. "Already the credit agencies have spoken about the department's need for increased revenue," Villaraigosa said in his letter.

The most irritating thing about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's carbon surcharge proposal is not the increase in electricity rates it would impose on Los Angeles residents and businesses. Higher rates will no doubt hit ratepayers harder because of the struggling economy, but increases are coming one way or the other, and the mayor is right when he says it's better to raise rates now to invest in renewable power generation and similar clean-energy programs than to raise them a year or two later to cover the increasing costs of dirty coal and to pay the looming penalties for spewing pollutants and carbon into the atmosphere.

Residents who live around 45th Street and Central Avenue cheered when they learned the city of Los Angeles was working to transform a vacant lot across from a public library into a small park for children in the neighborhood. The city spent more than $600,000 designing and building Vernon Branch Library Pocket Park in South Los Angeles, according to documents reviewed by The Times. But no one got to use it. Instead of a grand opening, workers put a fence around it. Then, after two years, it was bulldozed.

After months of stumping for rate increases, the head of Los Angeles' massive power and water agency asked the utility's board to approve a first round of hikes on Tuesday. The increases in water rates, which were unanimously approved, would add about $5 a month to the average residential user's bill. The hikes are much less than the increases proposed earlier this year by Ron Nichols, general manager of the Department of Water and Power. Nichols has agreed to put the bulk of those hikes on hold until the City Council names a ratepayer advocate to independently scrutinize rates.