LADWP: cheaper to fight than fix
After a billion dollars and eleven years, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power is suing to stop dust remediation in Owens Valley. It claims that Eastern Sierra monitors are moving goal posts for compliance, but the underlying strategy looks more like a business decision that DWP general manager recently summed up with the remark, "The legal fees pale in comparison to the cost of dust control.”Who he?
He looks less like the father of LA’s water system William Mulholland (left) and more like ER’s Anthony Edwards, but according to the Los Angeles Times, energy consultant Ron Nichols, managing director of the Seattle-based Navigant, is the new nominee to become the next general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power.
More will become clear about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s latest candidate for a post whose politics have chewed up and spat out nine water department GMs in the last ten years. All the Nichols bio page at Navigant offers is a nugget that makes him sound like a Wall Street version of Wen Jiabao. “Ron Nichols is a Managing Director in the Energy practice [sic] has over [sic] 30 years of experience in utility asset and enterprise financing, utility mergers and acquisition, and power supply portfolio planning and procurement. Mr. Nichols was the …