Save the Rain, Vote Yes on Measure W

ELECTION VOICES--As someone who worked her way up the ladder at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power from clerk typist to the first woman General Manager in the utility’s history, I’m proud of having fought for the ratepayers and led the economic, rate, and other reforms at LADWP. 

We made difficult decisions to slash pension costs by $4 billion while maintaining the integrity of the IBEW Local 18 agreement. That agreement is intact and on solid financial ground, as is the Department. The fiscal discipline our entire team demonstrated to garner multiple credit agency upgrades increased. 

Not all of these reforms were easy. 

Most reforms involved compromise by all parties—labor, , single family ratepayers, residential homeowners, multi family unit dwellers, commercial and industrial interests, environmental activists, politicians in City Hall and Neighborhood Councils—but in the end we came together. And, we earned back some of the trust the agency had lost and restored morale to our hardworking employees, many of whom are my neighbors here in Castaic/Santa Clarita, or friends in the Porter Ranch, West Hills, Chatsworth, and Calabasas neighborhoods. 

Measure W is not much different than the compromises we reached at LADWP. After decades of labor, environmental, municipal and regulator agency litigation, disagreement, chaos, and political hyper partisanship on how LA County can meet its federal stormwater obligations, Measure W is not the perfect solution. 

No compromise ever is. 

But, LA County Measure W has the fiscal controls in place that make me comfortable for me, as a forty-year utility executive, with making sure federal Clean Water Act mandates are met. It makes sense economically because hard working businesses and more affluent, fiscally responsible areas like the west valley are going to end up paying the tab—snd probably more than our fair share—anyway. So lets make it equitable. 

Measure W also happens also to make sense for the environment and our constrained energy grid. 

Vote yes for Measure W.

(Marcie L. Edwards is CEO of MLE Consulting. She served as General Manager of the LADWP.)

-cw