If you thought you'd seen just about everything from the Department of Water and Power, you were wrong. Now the city-owned utility company has admitted it cheated government agencies for a decade and will have to pay them $160 million as part of settlement announced Monday.
That's 10 times what DWP officials claim it will cost extra to give its workers a whopping 5.9 percent pay raise in the middle of the worst recession in a generation.
So you know what your rate hikes will be going for and why so many more are coming:
In June 2007, Superior Court Judge John P. Wade ruled that DWP had inflated its electric bills to governmental customers going back to 1998 by a total of $223.8 million because it charged them more than a share of the capital costs needed to generate electricity in proportion to the share of the plant's output they used.
Use 5 percent of the plant's electricity, pay 5 percent of what it cost to build: That was the rule. That was the law. But DWP plays by its own rules and charged a lot more than that.
So here's the windfall coming to local agencies:
- Los Angeles Unified School District -- $67.7 million
- Los Angeles County -- $32.3 million
- Metropolitan Transportation Authority-- $28.1 million
- State agencies -- $22.3 million
- Los Angeles Community College District -- $5.58 million
- University of California at Los Angeles -- $3.8 million
