Los Angeles City Controller Laura Chick recently discovered that LA’s Department of Water and Power spent nearly $90,000 on bottled water over the past two years during a period where they spent one million dollars promoting DWP’s water as “top quality.”

The message learned from this is that LA’s water is good enough for us little people (e.g., rate payers) but certainly not good enough for public servants. While some of the purchases can be explained for reasons other than just staying away from stinky brown tap water, it is clear that DWP has never heard the expression about the importance of “eating one’s own dog food.”

If LA’s officials need bottled water, why aren’t they drinking their own “top quality” water? I’ll tell you why, no one likes to look into a bottle and see little things swirling around, which is exactly what happens when you fill a clear glass with LA tap. That’s why people, in general, don’t drink from aquariums or stagnant ponds. Chick’s report showed that despite having 25,000 bottles on hand of LA tap, officials repeated turned to Sparkletts.

Doug Heller, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, had this to say about DWP management spending ratepayer dollars on water for their employees from an outside supplier:

“It strickes me as ironic that the city spends money touting the safety of its water to dring but won’t drink it themselves.”

In our view it’s not ironic, it’s hypocritical.

(full story: Los Angeles Times)

Update: I found the following off of DWP’s own website so maybe it’s time we all switched to bottled water.

In my book “Top Quality” does not include DBPs (aka “Total Trihalomethanes (TTHMs)” and “Haloacetic Acids (HAA5)”). Yeech!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 at 12:27 am by Insider and is filed under California Schemin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.