Money in the Lake

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/23/news-kelly.php

You will end up paying for repairing Owens Valley by William J. Kelly


A chill wind suspended a cloud of dust over the Owens Valley as the sun rose one recent spring day. “You couldn’t see the mountains,” recalled James Warren, who has spent his life below the towering eastern Sierra Nevada. “The entire valley is drying up.”
Now the bill for reversing the destruction of the valley’s watershed is coming due and is a main reason that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is looking for a large rate increase. The City Council turned down an 18 percent rate hike, and the DWP now proposes a 37 percent increase phased in over five years.

Deluged

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/19/news-greene.php

The larger lessons of the DWP’s bad day at City Hall by Robert Greene

It was a bucket of cold, chlorinated and slightly off-tasting water right in the faces of three honchos from L.A.’s most arrogant institution, the Department of Water and Power. City Council President Alex Padilla called forward the business-suited men at Tuesday’s council meeting and proceeded to make them just sit there, closed-mouthed, and listen while he and his colleagues put on a display of shock and outrage at the executives’ plan to jack up water rates by 18 percent.
“The Department of Water and Power has existed in its own world for a very long time,” Councilman Greig Smith intoned, before his colleagues approved his motion to delay any increase pending an outside agency’s look at the books.