The Water Bottle Shuffle

…And other minor news delights of this new year.
by Marc B. Haefele

It was Friedrich Nietzsche, the January-loving, hard-to-spell 19th Century philosopher, who said that events repeat themselves endlessly throughout history. It was Marc Haefele, the hard-to-spell City Hall columnist, who said that he was getting tired of events repeating themselves at City Hall. I’ve been working here less than 22 years, and that’s too short a time for things to be coming around as often as they do. Does Los Angeles have the shortest institutional memory in America? Who ever said that it didn’t?

So, despite the fact that the annual expense at stake is under $90,000—fiscal peanuts, officials say—I’m going to write about the recent micro scandal at the DWP, one of the nation’s two or three largest municipal drinking water vendors, which felt that it had to buy private-side water to slake the thirst of certain of its selected staffers. What gets me is that the city is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on promoting the safety and salubriousness of its own drinking water, while it’s spending scores of thousands of dollars more to supply its own employees with commercial bottled water that costs 800 times (the L.A. Times’ figure) as much as what comes out of a tap.

Not to all of its employees, be it said. Apparently, only those who asked for it. Our mayor has just inked an order mandating that this absurdity stop. My problem is that this was roughly the third such mayoral order to come down in my tenure at City Hall. Let’s see, there was Mayor Bradley’s city drinking water order in ’86, Dick Riordan’s in ’95. Antonio’s this month. Did someone say Steep. Learning. Curve?

We media vultures fell on this little tale, of course. It was as tasty as a story about Coke machines being officially installed in Pepsi’s headquarters. An easy outrage in a slow-moving local news week. The DWP official spokesperson made noises, at least according to Steve Lopez, that bottled water was needed for work crews sweating away in the Owens Valley and such places where “potable” DWP water was not available. The person added that the DWP was not in the water bottling business. Strange, I thought. I was once told that the DWP supplied the local drinking water in faraway places like Bishop and Lee Vining—are these Owens Valley towns now linked to the San Francisco water system? And tens of thousands of us who attended Mayor Villaraigosa’s inaugural just six months ago may recall we were plied with yummy, cold 16.9 ounce plastic bottles of drinking water proudly labeled “Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.” At the time, I was delighted that my favorite utility had finally learned to put water in bottles, just like the Sparkletts and Arrowhead people do. I guess in all the weeks since then, it somehow forgot.

Or maybe, and this is a horrid thought, the DWP bought all that bottled water from Sparkletts and put its own labels on it. In distrusting its own water, however, the DWP is merely reflecting what has long been a growing Southland trend, as the Times reported after a 1989 survey:

“In a stinging vote of no-confidence, nearly two-thirds of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers use bottled water or water filtration devices… A companion survey found that the DWP’s employees are almost as likely as [its] customers to use bottled or filtered water.” Oddly, this story followed only a few days by an item about the Consumer Union selecting DWP water as America’s best-tasting tap product. Even better, CU said, than New York City’s self-touted best water in the world

Events repeat themselves, but some things never change. I wonder: which bottled water company will be the first to use the DWP’s endorsement in its TV commercials?

But the real story here is about how our public utility keeps making, in the classic definition of stupidity, the same mistakes again and again, with exactly the same negative results. As though the flubs were actually on an agenda. Is this leadership? Is it even self-aware? Last year, it was the Fleishman Hillard billing outrages—DWP PR squandering, again. This month, it’s the bottled water gag. Again. Where does the Hope St. monolith sign up these decision makers? Is the DWP recruiting King Drew managerial oustees?
Speaking of Which
Thomas Garthwaite M.D. had his last hurrah before the Board of Supervisors the other day. He received an official commendation for his near-four years on the job, and one or two of the five members were also appropriately complimentary. “I’ve been here 11 years and with three health directors and none has accomplished more than you have, Tom,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who went on to thank him specifically and enthusiastically for his help in “putting the meat on the bone of the idea” of a property tax initiative to support trauma centers. The measure’s passage, he added, may have saved the county’s entire emergency care system. Yvonne Burke, whose district includes the King/Drew Medical Center, whose longstanding problems hastened Garthwaite’s departure, said some nice things too. That was about it. Garthwaite, in turn, thanked the board (I’m not sure quite what for), including the three members who’d said nothing in his favor, and he thanked county executive David Janssen. “I’ll be relatively easy to replace,” Garthwaite said, “I don’t know how you can possibly replace him.”

It was a gentlemanly assurance in a venue that rarely hears such propriety, particularly from a man who was being forced out of his job. I don’t know how the board would replace Janssen either, but so far as I know he has no intention of leaving. I have no idea how the board will replace Garthwaite, but he’s already gone. The Department of Health Services gave a 2-hour sendoff party to its best-ever executive manager after the board meeting was over. I’m informed that only two Supervisorial staffers dropped in on the party to personally say goodbye.

Cycles and Spleen
A lot of us have wanted to see our governor get a fat lip for the longest time.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cycle mishap actually served him well, however, sparing him a considerable amount of grilling on his budget and his new Kindergarten Cop spending priorities. Meanwhile, we Fourth Estate buzzards picked apart his “It was one of those things I never did” excuse for not having a motorcycle license. You can be sure that, considering Arnold’s wild past and not-too-sedate present, that the governor’s list of “things I never did” is a pretty short one. LAA