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Troubled Waters: the good side and bad side of Nahai

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 24, 2008 at 3:52 pm

From Los Angeles Magazine:

“Isn’t this beautiful?” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa asks through his biggest smile, a walking Eddie Bauer ad in blue jeans, a wool scarf, and hiking boots untouched by trail dust. His helicopter has just dropped him in the Owens Valley, next to the sluice gate where snowmelt enters the Los Angeles Aqueduct for the 223-mile trip across the desert. Comet tails of white powder blow off the peaks of the eastern Sierra to provide a dream backdrop. Villaraigosa has come to release water into the Lower Owens River as proof that he is a friend of the environment. It’s a nice gesture, but hardly impressive to Inyo County’s ranchers and fishermen. They’ve heard everything in the eight decades since Los Angeles dried up the Lower Owens. This morning, though, they are laughing easily with a natty figure who is sporting a black turtleneck and an English boarding school accent and hovering at the mayor’s shoulder.

H. David Nahai is the one Angeleno the locals trust—so far. At the podium he quotes Jackson Browne lyrics about repairing history’s excesses and vows to “preserve this Eden we see around us.” He’s been preaching this message across the state. It’s persuasive stuff here because Nahai is the new chief executive of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power—an environmentalist in charge of an agency whose tentacles extend across the West.

Nahai got the job last year despite his lack of the usual credentials. He’s a real estate lawyer, not an engineer or a city hall insider, and managing a firm with a dozen attorneys is not like running a department with 8,500 employees. Nahai is something of a policy wonk about water and the perils of global warming, but that doesn’t necessarily qualify him to lead a $4.2 billion monolith whose storied history begins with aqueduct builder William Mulholland. Lately the DWP’s image has taken some hits. Too many summer blackouts. Threats of water rationing. An unruly union and a scandal over public relations contracts that helped bring down Mayor Jim Hahn.

Read the full text of this story from Los Angeles Magazine by clicking here.

Ron Kaye doesn’t think too much of this article and has posted this response:

Every story needs a villain, and DWP General Manager David Nahai has achieved that status in the political story of L.A. in record time. At least that’s what many members of neighborhood councils, community activists, DWP managers and media mavens who have encountered Nahai’s arrogance and glib glossing over of the truth are saying.

But that’s only the half full glass of water view of the real estate millionaire turned environmentalist.

Every story also needs a hero and David Nahai is definitely that if you read the hagiographic puff piece in L.A. magazine’s July issue by Kevin Roderick, the expert in all things media in L.A., defender of the L.A. Times’ hack pack and public relations consultant.

Normally, I’d hold my nose and look the other way but given my passion for exposing the waste, inefficiency and corruption at the City Hall’s most powerful and insulated institution and Roderick’s holding himself as up the ultimate arbiter of all things journalistic, I cannot let this article headlined “Troubled Waters” go unnoticed.

Let’s start with the fact that the closest there is to a critical voice comes from a group out in Mojave worried about power lines. The rest is quotes that glorify and turns of phrase that befit a man who walks on water.