‘Ambitious’ plan for utility under review

CITY HALL — A draft five-year strategic plan for the city’s utility goes to the City Council on Tuesday, even as the forces of a recession and tight water supply converge to challenge what officials acknowledged was an ambitious set of goals.

Nine months in the making, Glendale Water & Power’s strategic plan calls for reduced rates, and cutbacks in spending to pay for them. It also calls for more use of recycled water, reduced electricity consumption, a greener energy portfolio and improved customer service.

There are 24 key goals included in the draft plan, which for the first time in recent memory, would set the utility against a comprehensive set of performance measures.

All of them are specific, ditching the historical models of broad, overall benchmarks.

Among them is goal to restore power outages within 10 minutes, and major blackouts within 210 minutes by December 2014. The same deadline would apply to an annual groundwater production rate in the Verdugo Basin of 3,856 acre feet as Glendale Water & Power tries to hedge more against its heavy reliance on water imports.

But it is the rate reduction goals that will no doubt receive the majority of attention Tuesday.

City Hall activists have stepped up their criticism of Glendale Water & Power’s relatively high utility rates as the economy has soured — a theme that has caught on with several candidates in the upcoming City Council election.

Several activists have even planned a March protest at City Hall over rates that are among the highest in Southern California.

“The goals of reducing the rates are by far the most ambitious,” said Glenn Steiger, general manager of Glendale Water & Power.

If the plan holds through, the more expensive electric rates could be reduced between 10% and 12%, he said, but much of that depends on efforts to renegotiate above-market energy contracts with outside suppliers.

“[The contracts] have been counter-productive for the city,” said John Miller, who serves on the Glendale Water & Power Commission, which endorsed the strategic plan Feb. 2.

While city officials have said they wouldn’t hesitate to use legal action to bring the cost of those long-term contracts back in line with current market rates, a strategic goals to keep water rates below 80% of the average rates in the region could be trickier.