did the mayor know?
new reporting shows the office of mayor eric garcetti met with DWP goons regarding the creepy billing litigation.
Hey sorry I haven’t posted in a while. 2022 has been a slow start for me. All I really did in January was watch YouTube videos of trees swaying in the wind to forget how terrible everything is. It’s called Tree TV. I definitely recommend it.
But everything’s going to be okay. Joe Biden is our president. And Eric Garcetti is going to become ambassador to India.
Speaking of Occidental College Diplomacy and World affairs Assistant Professor Eric Garcetti, I mean Mayor Eric Garcetti, did he know about what was really going on in DWP?
Because today we’ve got a report from roving Knock LA reporter Jon Peltz, who has obtained emails showing that LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s staff met with soon-to-be-convicted-felons Paul Paradis and David Wright. Staff also corresponded on private emails that summer over PwC litigation strategy (PwC is the consulting firm the city blamed for the billing problem). Now, this could be no big deal, but let’s be real: we are ruled by trash, and our masters want us all dead. At the very least it raises some very important questions and shows that the mayor’s office was involved with the DWP litigation strategy and how to spin it in the media.
Here’s some context for what was happening during this time period, which was summer of 2016 going into the fall:
The sham Jones ratepayer settlement was already a thing. On the surface a public relations effort by the city was underway to sell the prefabricated Jones v. City of LA settlement as a victory for the city, but the settlement itself was actually a mess. At this point it had been rejected by a judge multiple times, most recently during the summer leading up to a meeting with the mayor’s people. And attorney fees were skyrocketing. We know that a fake mediation was going down. There was one on Oct. 31, a few days after this Oct. 28 meeting with the city. Attorneys fees rose from $13 million to $19 million. Over half of those fees went to an Ohio attorney who did little work on the case for Jones and ratepayers. BTW he is dead now.
Paradis by this time had scored his first no-bid contract from the DWP board, a total of $6 million. And David Wright had just been appointed general manager of the utility by Garcetti. At the end of 2016, Paradis donated $1,400 to Garcetti’s re-election campaign, according to city campaign finance records.
Also during October 2016, the DWP board approved an additional $2.5 million in fees to the Liner Firm, which represented the city.
According to a massive court-sanctioned dossier regarding DWP:
Thus, approximately 65% of the Liner Firm’s fees ($4,172 million/$6.422 million) was allocated after the settlement had been reached in Jones v. City, and all that remained was the final mediation session, the November 2016 hearing on preliminary, and the July 2017 hearing on final approval.
So, it has to be asked: did Garcetti and/or his staff know that Paradis orchestrated the Jones billing lawsuit while repping the city? Did they know he took $2 million in kickbacks for it? Did they know Paradis scored a no-bid contract from the city? Did they know attorney fees were really high? What exactly did Garcetti’s staff talk about?
But also, if Paradis is trying to get the lightest possible sentence, why hasn’t he made an allegation that Garcetti/and or his people knew?
As Knock’s story quotes:
“Coordination between the mayor’s office and Paradis will catch prosecutors’ attention,” says Scott Tenley, a former federal prosecutor and now partner at Michelman & Robinson, “but if that coordination occurred on personal email accounts off of city servers, it becomes a red flag. That’s the type of email traffic that may not be turned over in response to a grand jury subpoena to the mayor’s office, if one has been issued.”
“Paradis has every incentive to provide information about criminal conduct within the mayor’s office given the length of the federal prison sentence he’s currently facing,” says Tenley. “In the end, nothing may come of it. But until prosecutors reach that conclusion, emails like this are likely to cause a few headaches at City Hall.”
As the private emails show, the city was trying to make PwC look bad. The correspondence contemplated floating a narrative to the media that PwC submitted false time records to DWP, and that taxpayer money was spent by PwC employees for a giant romp fest in Las Vegas with prostitutes and bottle service. It did result in a LA Times story. Officials also schemed on trying to get prosecutors to take criminal action. But what became of it? Nothing. The city’s lawsuit was ultimately dropped in light of the problems that came out of the billing case.
Remember that one of Garcetti’s campaign platforms as mayor was to reform DWP. Obviously that didn’t happen. People are still getting wrong utility bills.
Either he knew, or LA is such a bureaucratic mess that he didn’t. The latter might be scarier.
Anyway, I went on LA Podcast recently to talk about DWP. LA Podcast is a great source for local happenings so definitely go and check it out. There is so much to this story that doing it in soundbites does it no justice, so many props to the LA Pod crew for giving it an hour. It’s on Apple podcasts, or Spotify, or you can check it out right here.
As always, you can email me here with any thoughts/tips. I’m a really good listener.
Stay tuned. More to come.