More MWD Board Members Benefiting From Posts

One day this spring, Richard Mayer went to a south Los Angeles County golf tournament for disadvantaged youth. Mayer had a less than privileged childhood and, he says, does a lot of volunteer outreach work. He’s giving back, he says.

Except this wasn’t strictly a volunteer effort. Mayer is a member of the boards of directors of the Metropolitan and the Central Basin Municipal water districts. He reported the golf outing on his monthly water district expense accounts. Central Basin ended up paying him $177.29 for the day, a per diem of $172 for his time plus mileage.

It was in many ways a normal occurrence. Mayer, a retired restaurateur, collected $46,647.14 in water business expenses for the 12 months ending June 30. The amount is 10 times more than some directors’ expense claims and twice as much as most.

Mayer is one of a handful of the 51 members of the Metropolitan Water District board of directors who have turned what are nominally volunteer positions into full-time jobs. Some, like Mayer, are paid more than many of the full-time employees working for their districts.

“That’s not money that’s going to me to put in my pocket,” Mayer said, indicating that the payments were mainly for travel. In fact, though, records indicate that 61% of the total was paid not as reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses, but as per diem payments--in essence, a salary.

The Metropolitan Water District has always had directors who spent inordinate amounts of time on district business. The difference is they didn’t rely on Metropolitan as a principal source of income.

This is one of many changes that have occurred in the last decade among members of the Metropolitan board, which governs an agency that has been subjected to a barrage of criticism over the last year. Increasingly, the board itself has been a target of that criticism.

In interviews, board members, staff and people who do business with the Metropolitan are nearly unanimous in describing the agency as a place with fractured leadership. They say a main reason for this increasingly are the conflicting personal motives of board members. As a result, for much of the past three years, the board has had difficulty reaching agreement on--or even discussing--important issues.

One board member compared the directors to a bunch of junior high schoolers. Another said the boardroom was Camp Run-Amok. Others suggested better models might be the Keystone Kops or the Three Stooges. Jack Foley, the outgoing chairman of the board, is criticized for being a friendly but benign presence. In turn, he laments the difficulty of getting his colleagues to agree on anything.

“You’re taking that wheelbarrow down the road with 51 frogs in it,” he said. “They’re going to be doing some jumping.”

Almost without exception, Metropolitan board members used to come from three distinct segments of society--heavy industry, real estate development and the water business itself. Their interests in water were almost solely economic. Resulting Met policies were driven by one overriding goal: to get more water to fuel more growth.

Met directors served virtually for life.

Diversity of Board Members

When Carl Boronkay became general manager of Metropolitan in 1984, the median age of directors was in the 70s. Many had been there for decades.

Today, 80% of the board has been appointed in the 1990s. Once all white men, the board now includes eight women, four Latinos, three blacks and one Asian American; not exactly the United Nations, but radically different from the old Met.

More than just the faces have changed. The historic consensus has shattered as well. The 51 Met directors now come from different places with wildly different institutional needs and personal goals. Their goals are no longer purely economic, but include a mix of politics, career advancement and even paying the grocery bills. Agreement is much harder to reach when a millionaire occupies the seat next to somebody who is essentially unemployed.

Met directors are not directly elected. The method of appointment to the board varies from agency to agency. In the West and Central Basins, it is now common to spend tens of thousands to win election to the district board and then vote yourself an appointment to the Met.

In some areas the process is pure political patronage. The mayor of Los Angeles appoints the city’s seven Met directors; they are among a variety of appointments the mayor can use to reward campaign supporters. Whether it’s a political plum or crumb depends on your perspective. One Met insider said, “Let’s face it, people got put on there because it was the last place to put them. I mean, who the hell would want to be on the water board? That’s like being the ambassador to Paraguay.”

Several Met board members are retired. Some, according to financial disclosure statements, are very well-to-do. Others are career bureaucrats. Still others are ambitious entrepreneurs, or struggling lower-rung politicians.

Some observers have suggested that many current Met board members want to use it as a steppingstone to higher office. Mark Dymally, a Metropolitan director from the West Basin Municipal Water District and the son of former state lieutenant governor and Congressman Mervyn Dymally, tried and failed to be elected to the state Assembly two years ago.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, “in terms of running for other office, water don’t mean nothing.”

So why spend time in the obscure swamps of the water world? Met directors give various explanations: Water is important. It’s a chance to do something for the region. It’s addictive.

The job undeniably also has significant perks.

Where the Action Is

All Met directors are reimbursed for some expenses and in many cases are paid set amounts by the districts they represent for going to meetings. These per diem payments vary widely, from zero to $177 per meeting. The meetings vary, as well. They can be daylong or doughnut-break length.

Water meetings can, and do, occur everywhere from coffee shops in the South Bay to Las Vegas casinos and European capitals. The Metropolitan paid more than $18,000 for board members to attend a single meeting in Monterey last year. Whole flocks of directors fly en masse across the country to attend legislative briefings in Washington, D.C. Individual directors have dinner with one another in swank nightspots and charge the whole thing off to ratepayers.

On one occasion, Dymally, Mayer and a third director went to dinner at the Water Grill, a downtown fish house. The meal cost $307.55. Dymally picked up the tab and turned it over to West Basin, which reimbursed him and also paid $152.05 for his per diem. So the fish that night cost ratepayers $459.60.

Dymally occasionally takes his father to lunch and charges it to the district on the grounds that he is consulting on water business.

“I rely on him for counsel,” Dymally ssaid.

Over the last year Dymally was paid $34,374.21 in water board expenses. He lists his occupation as an officer in his father’s consulting company. Los Angeles County, however, apparently considers his income from that job less significant than his water board expense accounts; the county attaches Dymally’s expenses to pay child support bills.

Carol Kwan, Dymally’s colleague on both the Met and the West Basin boards, has been on the Met board for a year. She has turned herself into Met’s ambassador to the world. Kwan, who lists her occupation as president of her own small marketing company, was paid $39,619 in water board expenses.

She has in 12 months traveled to Spain and China, as well as less exotic ports of call in the United States including Atlanta, Washington, D.C., San Diego, Reno, Seattle, Miami, Albuquerque, Sacramento and Monterey. These trips were all financed fully or partly by Metropolitan or West Basin ratepayers.

Kwan said she has traveled extensively her whole life and her inclinations are to “look at things more globally. People say you go on junkets. No. Look at my attendance. I go to learn. I don’t have any background. I’m learning.”

Ship in Search of a Rudder

Several people interviewed for this story said the most powerful person at the Metropolitan is somebody who doesn’t even work there: Ron Deaton, the chief aide to the Los Angeles City Council with a longtime interest in water issues and politics.

Deaton says this is “preposterous” and, in fact, it seems less the problem itself than an indication of it--an almost total void of leadership.

John “Woody” Wodraska, who recently resigned as general manager of the Met, earlier joked that if somebody could figure out who was running the place, he would appreciate a call. The agency has long had a highly independent staff that resists direction.

“If you come in and try to impose a solution, they’ll kill it. You’ll never even find the fingerprints,” he said.

Wodraska said he spent most of his five years at the agency just trying to regain control of the staff.

The board, meanwhile, drifted.

The board is composed of representatives from 27 water districts and cities, which range in size from the city of Los Angeles to the tiny suburban outposts of San Marino and San Fernando. Representation is based on assessed value of property, which approximates population. In some cases, the member agencies are retail sellers of the water. Other Met members are wholesalers, serving still another layer of subagencies. In some cases, the subagencies have subagencies. There are at least 300 public agencies and private water companies in the regional water business.

Some member agencies have independent water sources. Los Angeles, for example, has its own aqueduct, using Met water as a supplement. San Diego uses by far the most Met water, almost a third of all the water the Met sold last year.

The differences among directors, many observers say, go beyond the individuals to these vastly different needs of the Metropolitan’s 27 member agencies and cities. With various agencies sending representatives to the Met with vastly different expectations, it’s no surprise that consensus is hard to achieve.

The Russian-doll nesting of these smaller water companies, one within one within another, is an invitation to bureaucratic trench warfare. The Met prospered for most of its 70-year history by providing leadership through this bog, whether asked for or not. It did this in part by retaining a remarkable degree of consensus among its members. It was run like a family business, and in some cases was. One current longtime Met director has the seat held for decades by her husband. Another has the seat once held by his grandfather.

But even in family businesses someone is in charge.

In many ways, the Metropolitan today can be compared to a family whose patriarch has died.

The survivors have been liberated from his rule and are free to do as they please. They haven’t quite figured out what that is yet. They’ve been too busy fighting over the will.