Dear Editor,
One of the reasons that thousands of homes in the Pacific Palisades and Malibu burned is because our elected leaders and the bureaucrats they hired took 10 months to sign a “single bid” $130,000 contract, which was then going to take another six months to repair.
The Pacific Palisades’ Santa Ynez Reservoir required repairs to a torn floating cover that compromised its water quality safeguards. Installed in 2012 to comply with federal regulations, this protective membrane prevents contamination from debris, animals, and bacterial growth. Key details about the repairs include:
Cause of damage: A tear was first detected in late January 2024 after rainstorms weakened the cover. The tear expanded over subsequent days, prompting the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) to immediately begin draining the reservoir to facilitate repairs that would not begin until some remote unknown future date.
Repair process: Draining the 117 million-gallon reservoir took almost two months due to environmental concerns about erosion from rapid water release. This left the Palisades with only three 1 million-gallon reservoirs. A common-sense approach would have been to hold off draining the reservoir until work was ready to begin, expedite repairs, and then get the reservoir back on line as quickly as possible. Instead, repairs were delayed by a lengthy competitive bidding process required under the city charter.
Only one contractor, Layfield Group (the original installer of the cover), submitted a bid. The $130,000 repair contract was finalized in November 2024, eight months after the reservoir was drained and nearly 10 months after the tear was discovered — with work projected to finish by April or May 2025. This was 13 to 14 months after the reservoir was first drained.
You can’t make this up. This is what we get when we elect incompetent career politicians to run a city! It is time to vote out these incompetents and vote in competent leaders like Rick Caruso!
Lawrence Weisdorn, Malibu