Showing posts with label DWP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DWP. Show all posts

Thursday, April 30, 2015

No WONDER They Played Hide And Seek

April 30, 2015 DWP , Jack Dolan 0 Comments
DWP trusts paid for steak dinners, trips to Hawaii, Las Vegas, audits find

By Jack Dolan, Apr. 30, 2015, Latimes.com

Two nonprofit trusts created by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and financed with more than $40 million from ratepayers paid millions to vendors without competitive bids, overpaid top managers and let them charge personal travel, gasoline and other items without filing expense reports, city audits released Thursday showed.

In five years, a handful of trust employees charged more than $660,000 to their publicly financed credit cards for things such as steak dinners and trips to Las Vegas, Hawaii and New Orleans, City Controller Ron Galperin said.

However, Galperin said, auditors did not find evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

One top administrator, who was making about $220,000 a year, used his trust-issued card for more than $30,000 worth of gas between 2010 and 2014, city auditors found.

The release of the audits ended a more than year-long political and legal battle waged against the city by the nonprofits' top administrators — particularly Brian D'Arcy, head of the city-owned utility's largest employees' union — to keep detailed spending records secret.

Read the full story:  www.latimes.com

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Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Privatize, privatize, privatize

November 19, 2014 Billing Fraud , Catherine Saillant 0 Comments
Poor Management Blamed For DWP Customer Billing Problems

Catherine Saillant, Nov. 18, 2014, Los Angeles Times

Quality assurance analysts warned DWP managers that additional kinks needed to be worked out, but those concerns were ignored.

"There's overwhelming evidence that we weren't ready to go live, and yet the department made the decision to go live," said Randy Howard, a senior manager, told DWP commissioners Tuesday.

Read more: www.latimes.com

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Friday, September 19, 2014

Privatize, privatize, privatize

September 19, 2014 City of Los Angeles , DWP 0 Comments
L.A.'s DWP Managers Agree To Undergo Formal Evaluation

By Emily Alpert Reyes, Sept. 16, 2014, Latimes.com

Hundreds of managers in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power are agreeing to formal, annual evaluations as part of a new pact with the utility — a groundbreaking move for an agency long targeted for reform.

Requiring such evaluations would be "absolutely standard" in many utilities, but represents a serious stride for a department that has lacked them, city ratepayer advocate Fred Pickel said Tuesday.

Failing to regularly assess employees has been "one of the things I found most shocking about the DWP," said Pickel, who was appointed to his position 2 1/2 years ago. "You can't judge progress in the organization without something like that."
If no one is telling you what you need to do to improve, your strengths and weaknesses, you're out there rudderless.- Tom Anderbery, president, Management Employees Assn

In recent memory, employees at the municipal utility have not had a formal, regular process for being evaluated after passing the probationary period for their jobs, according to the department. Many workers must be regularly evaluated during such a probation period after being promoted, but have no standard process for being assessed afterward.

"If no one is telling you what you need to do to improve, your strengths and weaknesses, you're out there rudderless," said Tom Anderbery, president of the Management Employees Assn.

DWP spokesman Joseph Ramallo added that in the absence of such rules, utility employees have still been assessed informally by their bosses, and someone failing to do their job could still be disciplined and ultimately terminated. However, the new pact will usher in "more formal employee evaluations" for managers, he said.

Read the full story:  www.latimes.com

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Thursday, August 28, 2014

Just privatize the sucker!!!

August 28, 2014 City of Los Angeles , DWP 0 Comments
DWP Apologizes, Is Hiring More People To Handle Calls 

By Rick Orlov, Aug. 27, 2014, Dailynews.com

The Department of Water and Power continued Wednesday to offer apologies for long wait times and billing problems to its customers, promising that some relief is on the way as it hires more people to handle the volume of telephone calls.

With callers on hold for up to two hours and only limited availability of a callback feature where people can leave their number and receive an automatic call, DWP officials told a city panel that it hopes within the next several weeks to add customer service representatives to handle most of the basic calls it is receiving.

“We have had challenges,” DWP General Manager Marcie Edwards testified to the council’s Energy and Environment Committee.

“Those have coincided with our summer billing period where we see a lot of movement by renters and now, with students returning and requesting power be turned on.”

Thirty-seven new customer service representatives are to be hired soon, and plans are being developed to hire 100 more. However, they will need to undergo five weeks of training to deal with the most basic calls and additional training to deal with all the issues presented by customers.

Read the full story:  www.dailynews.com

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Friday, August 1, 2014

Don't tell me... It's the DWP

August 01, 2014 Brady Westwater , City of Los Angeles 0 Comments
The REAL Reason LA Has 90 Yr Old Water Mains Exploding 

Source:  ABC 7 / UCLA Daily Bruin
By Brady Westwater, Aug. 1, 2014, Citywachla.com

NSIGHT-A lot of ink was spilled over the last few days on why Los Angeles hasn't rebuilt its decaying infrastructure after a good portion of UCLA was flooded by water main break on Sunset Boulevard.

Most commentators - including Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at LA OBSERVED - gave reasons why this has continued to be a problem - and discussed potential solutions to the problem. None of them, however, addressed a major - if not even, the single major reason why the DWP has not replaced our oldest water mains - much less proposed any solution to that problem.

That reason was first made public clear back in 2007 after an internal audit by the DWP showed that if the DWP had to use their own employees - rather than those hired by an outside contractor - it took both twice as long to do the work - and then also cost twice as much money - for the DWP crew to rebuild a truck line than if it had been done by the private contractor.

And the extra time and extra cost was not blamed on the skills or work ethic of the DWP workers. It was attributed to the union work rules which were designed in a way that made the work take twice as long - and cost twice as much money.

Read the full story:  www.citywatchla.com

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