MAKING A POWERFUL SACRIFICE FOR PROGRESS.

Byline: RICHARD NEMEC Local View

IT is one thing to argue about megawatt-hours and pennies-per-kilowatts in a theoretical political context, but it is entirely different when the local municipal utility says it has to build a new distribution station in your neighborhood.

Then the power crunch gets up-close and personal.

It is even more poignant when you are one of two small businesses operating on a site the utility now covets to build a hub for its wires and transformers.

California's ``electricity crisis,'' which has dominated the news for months while the city of Los Angeles has smartly watched from the sidelines, has not touched many L.A. residents or businesses.

We've been content to have good ol' Department of Water and Power, which has stayed aloof from rolling blackouts and political squabbling, coasting along on its excess supply of electrons made possible by a combination of foresight and luck.

DWP, however, is not exempt from the tremendous surge of electrical growth we've experienced with the Internet and dot-com economy.

The demand causes the local city-run utility to need to add what it calls distribution substations to help increase its ability to move sufficient amounts of power around its system to all of us.

It sounds good so far, but then you find out your neighborhood is going to be changed and your favorite dry cleaning establishment is going to have to move.

I have been observing closely for the past eight months a traditional NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) issue in the Westside Village neighborhood in West Los Angeles.

My dry cleaners are caught in the cross hairs of the electric demand surge. They are partners with whom I have been doing business for the past 10 to 12 years because they are customer-focused, genuinely nice people.

``They want to take this site - not right away - but in the next two years,'' Artur Terziyan told me during the holidays last year. He knows I write about energy and know a lot of people at DWP, including the general manager, so naturally he asked if I would check with my sources to see what was coming down. I did. And ``it'' was coming!

Electricity reliability of the broader Westside community is at stake, and someone's block or neighborhood has to take the hit for the greater good.

Unfortunately, my friend Artur and his partner, Leo, along with a larger retail pet supply store, were targeted as an ideal-size site in the ideal location close to the theoretical ``load center'' in the approximate middle of a rough circle surrounded by four existing distribution substations to the north, southwest, southeast and east.

DWP has held two public meetings. They were both predictable. The residents voiced their opposition, made suggestions, DWP listened and checked out four of the suggested alternate sites. The latest meeting was to report on efforts to look at alternatives, and tell the people none of them would work.

The second meeting brought out local City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, her chief aide and fewer, but more vocal, nearby residents.

Although the councilwoman promised to ``slow down'' the process to get better understanding among residents and to check out a few last-minute alternatives, the inevitability for the two local businesses and the nearby residents was that an inanimate, but looming, electrical system intersection was coming to their block.

Artur, Leo and the pet store are a different story. Their livelihood is being uprooted, and in the case of the dry cleaning partners (and close friends) who were established long before the pet store arrived in more recent years, more than a decade of painstaking work to build up a loyal clientele may have to be sacrificed for the greater common good.

As I sat through the 90-minute workshop earlier this month and listened to impassioned residents talk to logical, dispassionate DWP representatives, I understood both sides, and I could remember times when I had represented a similar large energy utility in the face of angry and skeptical customers.

What most institutions - with correctness and the ultimate power of eminent domain on their sides - do not do very well is look at totally nontraditional alternatives, outside the proverbial nine dots.

Ultimately, DWP's 3-million-plus customers will never notice. But some of us will. And Artur and Leo will not be able to forget. I know we call it ``progress,'' but I'm never sure when I know some of the human sacrifices that make it possible.