DEATON NOT BEST DWP MAN FOR JOB.

Byline: RICHARD NEMEC Local View

HERE we go again, Los Angeles: Local elected officials are up to their usual politics-as-usual approach to the city's Department of Water and Power, a $3 billion utility that happens to be the largest of its kind in the nation.

While never known for its political sophistication, the DWP has built a reputation in its post-World War II history as a well-run operation that produces tens of millions of dollars annually for the city general fund. The guys in City Hall, however, like to use it as a political football or piggy bank.

Now to really politicize the utility, Mayor James Hahn has suggested that the City Council's veteran chief legislative analyst Ron Deaton move over to head the giant utility. What does Deaton know about running a major utility enterprise? He started at DWP as a lowly civil service junior administrative assistant almost 40 years ago.

Come on, fellas, let's get real, as your children would say.

To be fair, there is some precedent for the mayor's proposed move. His Republican counterpart, former Mayor Richard Riordan, did exactly the same thing in the mid-1990s. Riordan made his chief of staff at the time, Bill McCarley, the DWP general manager for a three-year run.

In response to the then-real prospects for widespread retail competition in the electricity industry and an overemphasis on what market-based solutions could do for captive energy utility customers, McCarley oversaw a two-year, multimillion-dollar hands-on consulting study and reorganization of DWP by a branch of Texas-based billionaire Ross Perot's business empire.

Some of the study did some good in cutting fat, streamlining processes and updating the city-run utility's internal information technology systems. But when veteran public power guru S. David Freeman became GM in September 1997, he basically ignored many of the consultant's recommendations, and it turned out to help DWP avoid any fallout from California's energy crisis three years later.

The DWP, on its electric side at least, remains relatively well run, and the external economic pressures in the utility industry generally are much different than a decade ago, when Riordan made his bold political move. Hahn should thus rethink putting the utility into the political soup of his struggling re-election campaign.

The DWP needs a leader with an administrative and engineering track record in the utility business, but who is also sensitive to the close political oversight that any municipal utility must endure. Several former assistant general managers at the DWP who left under Freeman's reign to head smaller city-run utilities would be good candidates, as would the heads of some of the other large public-sector utilities scattered around the West.

As various state officials are warning, California faces some potential electric system challenges in the future, perhaps as early as the next two summers. The DWP already has the reserves and the excess high-voltage transmission capabilities that the state needs overall if we are to meet future growth. That's why California Energy Commission members are suggesting in a proposed draft energy plan that in the future there should be more close coordination between private- and public-sector utilities in the state. (Municipal utilities currently handle about 25 percent to 30 percent of the state's electricity.)

Given its large presence in the overall state power fabric, the DWP needs to be headed by a future-looking, technically competent general manager who is not going to concentrate on glad-handing at City Hall. The new GM's focus needs to be squarely focused on the bottom line of running a major organization responsible for two vital infrastructures - water and electricity.

Hahn and his mayoral campaign opponents on the city council ought to get together and agree that the DWP is off-limits for political maneuvering and game-playing. They ought to work cooperatively to name the best candidate from among a list of internal DWP and public power industry leaders who can do the job.

Come on, mayor, play the statesman role for a change.