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This extended episode of Energy West features an interview with Jason Hunter, a former employee of Riverside Public Utilities who for the past several years has been a whistleblower. For more than two years, in its “Tangled Web” series, CEM has been covering the situation around the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and its former general manager, David Wright. This week, on April 25, Wright was sentenced to six years in prison for accepting bribes from a lawyer in exchange for official action to secure a three-year, $30-million, no-bid LADWP contract for the lawyer’s company. The topic of this podcast is not LADWP, but Wright’s activities at RPU, which Hunter has been working to expose. Hunter’s allegations about Wright were backed up by a report completed in May 2019 by a private investigator hired by the City of Riverside Human Resources Department. Don’t miss this in-depth exploration of corruption in Southern California!
NewsData's "People in Power" is an exciting new biweekly podcast that explores issues in the energy industry, featuring expert guests from a wide range of backgrounds. Hosted by veteran energy journalists Jason Fordney and Abigail Sawyer of California Energy Markets and including appearances by writers from sister publication Clearing Up, People in Power will explore trends such as development of a Western wholesale electricity trading market, the transition to a more electrified world of new infrastructure and transportation, renewables integration and reliability, wildfire response and mitigation, and many other topics. "People in Power" draws from an unprecedented pool of expertise and insight in a way never seen before! It's available on all major podcast platforms as well as at www.newsdata.com.
Intro:
Welcome to NewsData's Energy West, a podcast about the energy
industry today and where it's going tomorrow.
Jason Fordney:
Hello, I'm Jason Fordney, Editor of California Energy Markets.
And this extended episode of Energy West features an interview
with Jason Hunter, who's a former employee of Riverside Public
Utilities that I would describe as a whistle blower.
For more than two years in my Tangled Web series in CEM, I've
been covering the situation around the Los Angeles Department of
Water and Power and its former general manager, David Wright.
This week on April 25th, Wright was sentenced to six years in
prison for accepting bribes from a lawyer in exchange for
official action to secure a three year $30 million no-bid LADWP
contract for the lawyer's company.
Other Los Angeles City's Attorney's Office and LADWP attorneys
have also made plea agreements in this case.
They include former LaDW Chief Information Security Officer
David Alexander, who pleaded guilty to one count of making false
statements to investigators, and former LA City Attorney's
Office Chief of the Civil Litigation Branch, Thomas Peters,
who pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting
extortion.
So I've covered this case extensively in CEM for more than two
years, but the focus of this podcast is not David Wright's time
at LADWP, but his previous job at Riverside Public Utilities,
where he worked with Jason Hunter.
The city of Riverside, prodded for years by Jason Hunter, has
been looking into contracts signed by Wright during his time at
RPU, where he worked with Hunter.
The Riverside City Council in January ordered auditing firm Eide
Bailey to talk to Hunter as it conducts an audit of
contracts signed by Wright between RPU and the Southern
California Public Power Authority.
RPU since 1980 has been a member of SCPPA, a joint power
authority with 11 municipal utilities and one irrigation
district. Hunter alleges that during his time at RPU, Wright was
involved in misappropriation of funds through
SCPPA. Hunter's allegations were backed up by a report completed
in May 2019 by a private investigator hired by the city of
Riverside Human Resources Department.
That report states, quote, "Mr.
Hunter appears to be credible and truthful in what he perceives
as misappropriation of public funds involving expenditures
between RPU and SCPPA." So this podcast with Jason Hunter was
recorded before Wright's felony plea
agreement and sentencing and before the Riverside City Council
voted to have Hunter interviewed as part of the Eide Bailey
audit. Wright's attorney did not return a request for comment on
this case while SCPPA's executive director told CEM that the
organization will participate in any investigation.
We hope you enjoy this episode of Energy West, as disturbing as
it is, and there will be much more to come in CEM's Tangled Web
series, which you can find at www.NewsData.com.
All right. We're here today with Jason Hunter, who is a resident
of Riverside County, California, former employee
of Riverside Public Utilities.
How are you doing today, Jason?
Jason Hunter:
Excellent. How are you?
Jason Fordney:
I'm great. It's good to sit down and talk with you about this.
I've set up a little bit of an intro talking about what's
happening with the audit, which was
approved back in June of 2020.
It's now been almost a year and a half, which I'm sure we'll
talk about this.
But as I was saying, maybe the best way to go about this is
just, let's go back in time a little bit to around the
2012 timeframe.
You're working at RPU, and you start seeing some things that
seem a little bit unusual to you.
Can you get into that?
Jason Hunter:
Sure. And maybe we should go into a real quick description of
what SCPPA is, the Southern California Public Power
Authority for your listeners.
Jason Fordney:
Sure.
Jason Hunter:
It's a joint powers agency which consists of, I'm going to say, a
dozen or so
of what they call publicly-owned utilities, which are different
than the investor-owned utilities that most people aware of: the
PG&Es, the Southern California Edison's, the Dominion Resources,
American Electric Powers and all over the
country. Those are owned by investors.
Out in California, they have quite a few publicly-owned
utilities.
They're actually owned by the ratepayers, and they consolidate
their bargaining power on big projects.
This is the reason why SCPPA was started, was to allow them to
join in with other utilities, to get economies of scale,
to drive better deals for transmission assets, for power plants.
And really, the big dog in this joint power agency, SCPPA, is
LADWP,
which is also known as Los Angeles Department of Water and
Power.
And so my involvement with SCPPA started when I was hired by RPU
in 2009.
And I've been in the energy industry at that point in time for
about a decade.
I had worked for several very, very large energy trading firms
across the country.
And it had risen to the level of the head of all marketing and
trading at Public Service Company of New Mexico before I
came out here to California and took over the role of really the
head of their marketing and trading
department at their local utility procuring their electricity
and natural gas supplies.
So, that's how it kind of all started.
I was there for a few years, and one of the tasks that I was
assigned to was working
on the implementation from a regulatory perspective of the cap
and trade system for
carbon in California.
And this is back in a decade or so ago with, I believe it was
AB31, was the bill that was
put in place, the state's goals to limit carbon to 1990 levels
and then dropped them from
there. I forget exactly the details of that at this juncture.
But anyway, so I was participating in these SCPPA calls with
these other regulatory
subject matter experts.
And who's in SCPPA?
You've got LA, the City of Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, Colton,
Azusa,
Imperial Irrigation District, I could go on and on.
But just to give you a flavor of some of it, and of course, LA,
just to give you a flavor of kind of what the the folks that were
in on those calls. And we were, of course, trying to make sure
that the regulation was done in a way that was positive for
particularly for me, for the smaller, publicly-owned utilities,
maybe have 100,000 customers versus some of the big
IOUs, independently-owned utilities, investor-owned utilities
that have millions of customers.
So we're a fraction of the size.
And so I noticed that those meetings were being run by a lawyer.
And I remember seeing some of the bills for the lawyer and
saying, "Boy, this law firm is getting paid an
awful lot of money.
And I don't remember this law firm's contract ever being
approved by
the Board of Public Utilities or the City Council." And so
that's kind of how my interest in SCPPA started.
And I reported that to my boss, and he kind of had the same or
similar thoughts.
And we were told at that juncture, you know, "Hey, listen,
you're the marketing and trading guy.
You're not the internal compliance guy.
It's none of your business, you know, why are you even asking
questions about it?" Right.
Jason Fordney:
Wow.
Jason Hunter:
So it kind of, you know, that's kind of how it all started.
And of course, that kind of response is what drew further
interest from me as far as what
was going on at SCPPA.
Jason Fordney:
Which law firm are you talking about?
Jason Hunter:
Oh, I don't remember off the top of my head anymore.
It's been so many years have passed.
But anyway, so that went to, my manager eventually went on to
another job back in the private sector.
And I had a real problem with the utility at that point in time.
Once my manager left, because I was making complaints about
SCPPA and some other things, I
was probably seen as a bit of a squeaky wheel.
And as being somebody in the private sector, that was never
really a problem.
But in the public sector, what I found was, boy, they don't like
squeaky wheels to report problems.
And so every time I'd report them, I'd report a problem about
what I thought was inappropriate behavior on behalf of the
utility, I would get a lot of negative feedback.
Some people might even call it harassment and retaliation.
Well, once I lost my manager there who was supportive of me
asking those questions, boy, that retaliation and
harassment really ramped up another level.
This is probably in about 2012 or so.
I got a new manager, and she was not open-minded about somebody
like me making complaints about how the utility was
running itself. And I just thought that we were doing a lot of
things that weren't in the best interests of our ratepayers.
And so eventually it culminated in me getting disciplined.
And as part of that, there was an investigation.
And the investigation, they hired a private, some sort of
subject matter expert to conduct an
investigation into me in a really wonky subject, it was called
resource adequacy.
And they were trying to pin it on me, a near crisis that happened
that I didn't have the authority to do anything about.
But yet they were trying to say I had the authority, and I
should have done something about it.
But if I had done something about it without the authority, that
would have given them reasons to actually fire me.
Instead they said, "Well, you didn't do anything about it, and
because we think you should have and that you have the authority
that you say you didn't, we're going to discipline you anyways."
So as confusing as that sounds, that's what happened.
And so then I found out that while I knew I was kind of getting
railroaded, and I was getting set up.
They they didn't want me there.
I was kind of a square peg in a round hole.
I didn't really fit the culture, but I was a classified civil
servant, and they couldn't fire me without cause.
So what they were doing was just building a case in order to get
rid of me.
And this investigation was part of it.
And I looked to see where they had hired this investigator out
of, who I
had a previous relationship with several of the managers, a
professional relationship with several of the managers
there. I knew that from just my three and a half years of
working there.
Somehow he ends up doing the investigation.
And I said, "Well, where is he getting paid from?" And sure
enough, I tracked back the money and somehow or another he's
getting paid out of a SCPPA account.
And I thought to myself, "Well, this is a joint powers of
authority that really has one purpose and one mission, and that's
to allow smaller utilities to aggregate their buying power in
order to buy transmission and power plants.
How the heck are they running investigations of employees
through this organization?" I
thought something is really screwy here.
So then I started digging deeper in probably the end of 2012,
2013, and what I was finding was
that the utility was running a lot of consulting contracts and a
lot of
extraneous business that didn't seem to be, they had the
authority to do under the SCPPA Charter.
They were running it through what they called the Palo Verde
Energy Account.
So they have this contract, the City of Riverside, and many
other utilities as well, with the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant.
And of course, that generates a very large amount of energy,
especially for considering an irrelevant size to these smaller
utilities. And so the city would be on the hook for purchasing
this resource
adequacy and these power contracts at a contracted price.
Obviously, they agreed to many years before, but what they were
doing was they were burying a lot of these charges for these
consultants and for these other activities as just line items,
not really describing what the activities were, just
listing contract numbers.
Sending them to the utility directly from SCPPA, and then the
utility would send them to
the city's general fund, and they would be rubber stamped and
paid without any question whatsoever.
And almost all of these contracts had never been approved at the
local level as far as either boards of public
utilities, that's how it worked in a publicly-owned utility or
their city councils.
And there was almost zero awareness, I would say there was zero
awareness amongst these boards and councils that these
activities were even taking place and yet they were spending.
Remember, Joint Powers Authority doesn't really have any of its
own money; all of its money comes from its members.
So they were spending City of Riverside money without without
following any of the City of Riverside policies.
Jason Fordney:
And I assume the current audit that is happening approved by the
RPU board
is looking at these very contracts because the audit covers
January 1st, 2009, all the way up to the end of 2018.
Jason Hunter:
Yes, that's correct.
Jason Fordney:
They're going to be the topic of the audit then.
Jason Hunter:
So the way it works in a government agency is that certain
officers within the agency are able to spend
with what they call "own signature authority." They can spend up
to $10,000, $25,000, $50,000 maybe it's $100,000 in some
places. It all depends on the individual agency.
They can sign those contracts without taking it back to any sort
of governing board right.
At the City of Riverside, that limit was $25,000, but what I was
noticing when I was looking at some of these contracts is that on
an annual basis, some of these contracts were for several
hundred thousand dollars.
In fact, I think there was one is as high as or close to the
$700,000.
And so my immediate question was, how does the the general
manager of that agency, it seems that he's spending 50
times what he would normally be able to spend if he ran the
contract through the city process.
How is he able to get 50 times the spending authority by running
it through SCPPA?
That didn't seem kosher.
It didn't seem to mesh with anything I had ever heard of.
And so that, of course, was the first red flag.
And then I thought, well, supposedly SCPPA is here for
transmission and power projects, how are they
running consulting contracts on energy efficiency?
How are they doing training?
How are they doing legal services?
How are they doing investigations?
How does this fall under the SCPPA contract at all?
So I thought that seems like another source of potential
misappropriation of funds.
And then lastly, I checked, and I saw their big purchases were
for energy efficiency programs.
And I went, and I found some votes by our local governing body
here, our city council, that had allowed the utility
in conflict with the the SCPPA Charter, by the way, but it
allowed the utility to manage some of these programs through
SCPPA for $100,000.
It was capped at $100,000.
And of course, the utility was blowing through those
appropriations limits.
So I thought, boy, we got some real big problems here.
And I started talking about them internally at the utility, as
well as many other subjects that probably we could do a podcast
series on of things that I thought were inappropriate activities
at the utility, a lot of them harmful to directly
harmful to the ratepayers.
But for this podcast, I guess we're going to try to keep it to
SCPPA.
But what ended up eventually happening is, I was demoted based
upon this investigation,
probably the fall of 2012.
And after I was demoted, the city claimed that I was put on a new
probationary status, and I was as soon as I came
back to work, I was fired within weeks.
As I said, I was on a new probationary status.
And they did that, of course, without cause.
No cause. And so that began a real period of turmoil
where for the next couple of years, I was in the court system
suing the city for illegal
termination under the whistleblower statutes.
Which I in turn eventually would be the prevailing party in
January, I believe, of
2015. So that takes us to 2015.
In early 2015, after I had settled my individual claims with the
city, I think they
expected me to take off and leave town.
I wasn't from Riverside, and maybe they expected me to go back
to somewhere, just get out of Riverside.
But I stuck around, and I wanted to see that there was
accountability for a lot of the things that I thought were
inappropriate, or I thought were some of them were plain out
illegal at the utility.
So I started going down to the local board of public utility
meetings and the city council meetings and making public
all the complaints that I had made internally at the utility
while I was there.
And then, of course, other things that I would learn during the
course of my lawsuit.
After I'd been fired in 2013, I would discover even more things
that were inappropriate, in my opinion, illegal going on in the
utility. And SCPPA was one of them that I headed off with
because it seemed clear to me that something very wrong was going
on at SCPPA.
And I think I made the first public report of inappropriate
activity to the City of Riverside's Finance Committee, I want to
say, in the spring of 2015.
And then they kind of tossed....
Go ahead.
Jason Fordney:
I was just going to say at that point, since you had settled, you
were allowed to speak.
You'd been under a gag order to that point, right?
Jason Hunter:
Well, you will find that most attorneys don't want their clients
speaking about the underlying issues within their case until, you
know, until they've settled the case, or there's been some sort
of judgment in the case.
So, yeah, I was advised not to be too too loud and proud about
what I was going to say until after we
settled our case.
So that was a little bit of a delay.
And so I made the reports.
I thought as soon as the city council realized what the utility
was doing over at SCPPA, they would immediately
rush in on white horses to change and fix the situation.
But that is not what happened.
And what I've come to realize is that a lot of folks who sit on
these city councils, they're not
professional government administrators, right?
Some of them might have been termite inspectors.
They could have been police officers.
They could have been nurses, anything under the sun.
So they don't necessarily have a great understanding of
government process and how it needs to work.
And so what I saw a lot of was obfuscation and bamboozling by
the professional staff with the council at the
Finance Committee to kind of make them think that everything
they were doing was aboveboard and A-OK.
And that was very frustrating to me to not get the support that
I thought I needed at that point in time to sort of fix what was
obviously a problem, and in my opinion, was misappropriation of
public funds.
And so that kind of got tossed around at that committee for, I
would say, maybe two years.
And nothing was really ever resolved.
Eventually I got frustrated with that, and I took it to another
committee where I thought there might be a better understanding
of the government processes issues.
That was what was then called the Government Affairs Committee
over at Riverside, and there were different council members on
there. That committee consisted of more senior council members
who'd have a little bit more experience with how the city needs
to operate. And from there, things started to take off.
Now, keep in mind, this is now four plus years after I had made
my initial complaint about inappropriate
activities. So and trust me, it's not going to get solved for a
while longer.
I'm just giving your listeners an early heads up that, you know,
we're still kind of waiting on the final results on that.
So this takes us to 2017.
The committee says Government Affairs Committee says, yeah,
we've got a problem here.
And eventually, I think towards the end of the year, they say
you're going to end this activity, and you're going to change
these processes.
And we're going to, we need an audit to see what the heck's been
really going on over there, and see how much money has gone out
the door. Where has it gone to?
Were there violations of city policy?
Were there violations of state policy or state law?
Anyway, this is the end of 2017.
And so I'm finally thinking to myself, okay, you know, the
journey is almost over.
I've been pursuing this for, you know, at this point in time,
five years to get something done.
And the audit comes back in, I would say, the spring of 2018.
And the audit comes back, and it's done.
It's not outsourced.
It's done by the internal audit department over at the city,
which was the first red flag for me.
And so I read the audit, and the audit has a lot of the
information I'm looking for, which clearly would
lead most people to think we've got some improprieties going on.
But you get to the conclusion, and the conclusion reads
essentially, there's nothing to see here.
Everything was aboveboard.
Everything was done with within policy.
This was all a giant waste of time.
So I'm absolutely outraged at the results.
But yet the city is, in my opinion, was looking to, I thought,
was looking to bury the improprieties.
So at that point in time, we changed our city manager.
And there was a little bit of, whenever you have a big change at
the executive leadership position within a city, things kind of
like don't get done for a little while.
We had a new city manager coming in.
And I was starting to make my case to the new city manager that
that audit report was bogus, and we needed to
do something about it. I don't know what exactly I wanted to do
at that point in time, but do something.
And I was reading through, this is the really a one in a million
thing here, I was reading through
random public records act requests made to the City of Riverside
.
Because I obviously had a lot of spare time on my hands, right?
And, of course, any public records request you make, is a public
document in and of itself.
And I was just kind of seeing what are people looking for over
at documents at the city.
And and I came across one which stated and I'll tell you this was
completely random; I wasn't looking for it.
I just happened across it.
I came across one that said, you know, why is Vincent Price, and
I recognized that name as the person who
from internal audit who had done the audit of SCPPA.
Why is Vincent Price doing any audits of Riverside Public
Utilities,
RPU, when he is like the longtime boyfriend of the former
general manager, Dave Wright?
He should be forbidden, and he has a conflict in doing any sort
of audits like that.
And then person went on to request some records.
And I got to tell you, Jason, my jaw literally hit the floor at
that juncture.
Because I thought to myself, wait a second, you're telling me
that the person the city picked to do the audit of SCPPA
is the 20 year boyfriend of the former general manager that I
had been accusing of
potentially misappropriating public funds?
That I had sat down with in an interview and given him all the
evidence that I had of improprieties at SCPPA, and he had never
once mentioned that he was this person's boyfriend?
And the target of these improprieties would have been that
general manager at the time.
He had since moved on. I think he had left the utilities shortly
after I did in 2013.
He went out to Las Vegas for a little while, and then he ended
up actually coming back to California and landing over it at
LADWP, which is of course another story.
So.
Jason Fordney:
Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, that's...
Just to inform people a little bit.
This is why when I cover this, I call it the Tangled Web.
Mr. Wright goes to LADWP, becomes involved with the billing
scandal.
His office is raided by the FBI.
He's fired.
So that's another maybe a little large red flag, you know.
Jason Hunter:
And of course, Dave Wright was the person who came in and
personally fired me in 2013 without cause.
And shortly after I was fired, the city sent
three uniformed police officers up to my house to suggest that
if I was ever to show my face down at City Hall or any city
property in the future, I might end up with a couple of bullets
in me.
Jason Fordney:
So talk about that a little bit.
Because now we're getting into some crime drama kind of stuff
here.
So this is clear intimidation, and the police officers come to
your house, and what do they say exactly?
Jason Hunter:
Well, it was all based upon this.
So when they were firing me without cause, I knew my rights as a
civil servant, and I knew that I could not be fired without
cause. And they were trying to do some legal wrangling and
wordsmithing to say, "Oh, but there's an exception
. We can do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And I was like,
That doesn't make any sense.
And I said to them on my way out the door, I talked to Dave
Wright, and then I talked to the HR Department.
I said, "Listen, I'm going to murder you guys in court.
You guys are done.
You're finished. You're dead in court because what you're doing
is clearly illegal, clearly illegal." And of course, then those
words were taken out of context to then go to the police and say,
"This guy made threats against us.
And, you know, you need to go up there and basically send him
the message I sent." And that's what they did.
They came up, and they went up to send me a message.
And, you know, it's never a direct threat.
It's always something along the lines of, you know, we're
experienced police officers.
We would never do this, but we're going to hang your picture all
over every city building in Riverside.
And if you show up there, it's going to say this is a potential
emergency.
This person is disgruntled, hostile, aggressive, dangerous
individual, and you need to call the police.
And they said, "Well, if we showed up, we, of course, would be
mature officers.
We would be fine.
But what if a rookie shows up and he gets excited, and he ends
up shooting you?"
Jason Fordney:
Wow.
Jason Hunter:
And I said, you know, "Could you repeat that again, but this time
for the camera?" You know, so strange.
So I immediately filed a report with the Riverside, has a
community police review commission that
is a commission of volunteer citizens that review complaints
against our police here
as a result of a big high profile case called The Miller Case
back in the early
2000, I believe, or late, late nineties, where they were forced
to put this commission in place by the state of California, I
believe, under a consent decree.
But anyway, so I filed my complaint with them.
I think that day or the next day, and said this is completely
inappropriate.
It's intimidation. It's in order to get me to stop complaining
about all the improprieties I saw down
at RPU.
And of course, that went nowhere.
That was another like what I call illegitimate process, where
it just went nowhere.
And I always think about back to that, the one thing that always
stands out to me is that when you look at the police reports from
when they, of course, they did an incident report when they came
to my house, the police reports all say that there's audio they
took. They have their audio transponders on them.
And I think under their policy, they're required to record any
interaction with the public.
And so there's a checkbox on those police reports that says we
have audio of this interaction.
And when I made my public records request, Jason, guess what
happened?
They all seemed to disappear.
Jason Fordney:
So you never heard any — obviously there are no recordings of
this police interview ever came out.
Jason Hunter:
No, and it was thrown out. My all my complaints were thrown out
as unfounded.
So it didn't really go anywhere.
But I will say the visits with the police stopped right after I
made my complaint.
So that goes, once again, that was back in 2013.
So let's get forward to the, not the present, but the near past.
I think we were back in early 2019 was when I
discovered that Vincent Price had been auditing Dave Wright.
And I immediately went down to the Government Affairs Committee
and went on a tirade about how
inappropriate this was and how impossible it was that nobody on
staff and
nobody on the council, it was impossible that nobody wouldn't
have known about
this long standing relationship with the former general manager
of the utility.
I just thought it was they had known, somebody had to have known
about this relationship.
And they just they didn't think it mattered.
They didn't think that it was a big deal that this was allowed
to occur.
And I thought this is just reprehensible behavior on all parties
behalf.
But it did result in that committee ordered
an investigation, not into SCPPA, but ordered an investigation
into whether or not this
auditor had a conflict of interest when he conducted his
internal
audit. So that's an important distinction.
Jason Fordney:
And so at the time, one of the Riverside council members actually
put out
a statement where he, quote, "believed there was a conflict of
interest on the part of Price in his audit of SCPAA." And he had
serious concerns about the expenditures between RPU and SCPPA.
So things are starting to come to the surface a little bit, it
sounds like.
And this investigation that comes up really, really blows it out
and finds.
Well, you can tell us what happened with the investigation.
Jason Hunter:
So the city hires an ex-investigator from the local DA's office,
and he comes down and interviews a bunch of people, including
myself. And the outcome of that investigation was, well, he
clearly had a conflict of interest investigating
his boyfriend.
And so he goes a little bit beyond that, though.
He says in another line, there may have been expenditures made
by RPU that
were run through SCPPA that violated the spending limits set by
the city council.
And there appears to be potential unauthorized spending by
general managers of RPU through SCPPA.
Well, both of those things that he's alleging are criminal
activity.
It's misappropriation of public funds, as I understand them
anyway.
And so I thought, okay, here we go.
And the investigator wasn't compelled to make those statements,
but he felt so strongly about some of the evidence that he had
seen, he made them, even though that wasn't his directive under
what they had contracted him
for [inaudible] SCPPA.
It was really just to see whether this guy had a conflict of
interest again, which I think even, you know, almost I would
think a fourth grader would have understood he had a conflict of
interest, but we had to go through the process and get an outside
opinion on it. So anyway, so that's where we are in 2019, and
I'm thinking, okay, it is now
been almost seven years that I've been trying to end what's been
going on at SCPPA and get some accountability on top of that.
We are really going to see things take off now, right?
I said, boy, oh, boy, all this work's been worth it.
And so, nothing really happens.
And so I start demanding from the council and four members of
the council are
removed, or I think three of them left and a fourth one was
removed later that year.
And the city council is only seven members, so it was the
majority of the council, and that sort of once again put things
on pause again.
I had to wait until a new council got seated, and it took me til
I want to say
early 2020 to get it in front of the new council's nose and get
them
interested in finally conducting a real outside audit of SCPPA.
Remember, that hasn't taken place.
And the city manager, of course, could have done it at any time
he wanted to.
There's a new city manager brought in place in late 2018.
His name is Al Zelinka.
He's still there at the city.
He's known about the conflict of interest.
He could have ordered it under his own signature, $50,000 if he
wanted to do it.
But he waited for the new council to oame in.
The new council gave him directive.
It was bandied back and forth between who was going to pay for.
Was it going to be the city council out of its general fund?
Was it going to be the utility as directed by its Board of Public
Utilities?
I don't want to get too much in the weeds there, but eventually
they decide, we're going to do this audit, dadgum it.
We're going to hire an outside firm.
And I think they finally agreed on it.
Maybe I'm going to guess early summer of 2020.
And I was told that the audit was completed actually in
November of 2020.
And I was told by several council people when they were being
interviewed by the external auditor, because remember now you're
talking about stuff that that went on years before a lot of
these people were even on the council.
And once again, they're not experts in government spending and
appropriating and all these joint powers authorities.
I was told by several members of the council when they were
interviewed, they said, "You know, why don't you go talk to Jason
Hunter? He's been dogging this for eight years.
He's the sort of the, you work for the utility.
He's got expertize in the subject matter.
He has all the documents.
Why don't you go down and sit down and schedule an interview
with him?
Because he probably knows ten times, maybe 100 times more about
this issue than we do ourselves." And of course, I never heard
from that auditor.
And so I start clamoring, and I'm hearing that the audit is
finished, and I'm thinking to myself, you know, why would you
finish an audit without interviewing the guy who's been doggedly
pursuing this and was an insider at the
utility for eight years?
And so I start making a stink up at the city council level, and
they say, you know what, we're going to amend the contract with
the auditor to make sure that the auditor takes comments and
evidence, ect.,
etc., from the public.
And they did that. Of course, that takes several months to get
done.
And then eventually the auditor posts on some remote website
that nobody would look at except for somebody who was really,
really interested in SCPPA audits, which is probably one person
in all of Southern California.
I find the requests for the documentation, and I submit my
letter with my
allegations as to what was really going on at SCPPA.
That was done in April of 2021.
And I was promised, hey, listen, they will accommodate and look
into what your allocations are, and I'm
sure we will have an audit back by early summer.
This one person submitting their comments at the end of April.
How long can this possibly take?
And every single month since the early summer, I have been told
that this audit will be forthcoming shortly.
And that's pretty much happened.
June, July, August, September, October, and now we're into
November.
And I'm still hearing the same song and dance, which is this
audit that government, once again, is on its way.
Any time, any day now it's coming forth, and now we're
approaching since I think I first made my initial complaints
about SCPPA internally.
Once again, the processes have been mostly fixed, but there's
been no accountability.
We are now approaching nine years.
And that is the story of SCPPA.
Jason Fordney:
And by this point, I'm covering this issue, and I'm communicating
with RPU, and
they're telling me the same thing.
I did a story when they approved the audit in June 2020.
I can't remember the original time frame, but it ended up being
October, which I patiently waited till October.
And then I was told last week that it's going to be done by the
end of the year.
There's where we're at with that.
And do you think there's a question of statute of limitations
here?
I mean, I'm not suggesting anything intentional, but I don't
know what it is for this type of thing.
But, man, what a dragged out process we have here.
Jason Hunter:
Well, I think it's reprehensible behavior on behalf of the city
to commission a report that says
there's potential misappropriation of funds going on here and
take two and a half years to get
to the bottom of that.
I don't know any other organization in existence that would
think that's an acceptable timeline
when we're talking about the misspending, possible expenditure
of public money.
And so my experience with the city has been, when they're caught
red handed with their hands in the cookie
jar is to sandbag.
And so do I think I'm being sandbagged at this juncture?
Well, I mean, it's been nine years.
Jason Fordney:
It seems pretty obvious.
And the RPU board, I covered the meeting when they approved this
audit.
They were not eager to do this by any stretch.
What are some of the quotes "this keeps bouncing back.
I'd really like to get it done and over with." I guess that maybe
shows they want to get it done.
But yeah, you can feel a reluctance.
They don't want to dig up this issue, and that seems obvious.
Jason Hunter:
Well, I think it's bad press for them, right?
I think it's bad press.
And so what they've changed, they feel like they've changed the
policies to make sure
that that kind of misappropriation, once again, potential
misappropriation, can't happen in the future.
But they have no desire to hold any of the bad actors
accountable.
Nor really it seems to be they have no intellectual curiosity or
fiduciary
responsibility. They're kind of being negligent towards, well,
what happened with all that money?
Was it, even if it was only misappropriated or potentially
misappropriated, was some of it embezzled?
Was some of it completely misspent?
Where did the money go?
We don't even want to know.
And I find that to be really troubling of that culture.
We don't even really want to know where the money was.
Jason Fordney:
Yeah. And some of the individuals we're talking about, and you
and I have discussed this, this is a tight knit political scene
of powerful people.
Mr. Wright was LADWP General Manager, the billing scandal.
Who else? Other offices were raided.
L.a. City attorney Mike Feuer, who's now running for mayor.
And then the billing scandal, you know, just another crazy
story.
Jason Hunter:
The billing scandal was, of course, intertwined.
I won't get into the details of the LADWP case, but the billing
scandal intertwined with SCPPA.
So there is some intersectionality there, is that once the
Aventador contract
was terminated by LADWP's governing board, not their city
council but their
board of utilities, I forget exactly what the nomenclature is
they call it over there.
Mr. Wright then re-hired the same actors under a different name.
I forget if the original name was Aventador.
Was that the subsequent name?
I don't know. But he hired almost the original actors, the
people who were made up that LLC,
I believe it was under a different name through SCPPA.
He just brought back the same people after the contract had been
terminated.
So there is a SCPPA sort of story to tell in the whole LADW
thing, which of course I don't know where it is with
the FBI and the court systems.
I haven't been following that closely lately.
Jason Fordney:
There's a lawsuit still pending, I believe, by Antoine Jones
against LADWP.
He was just a rate payer customer who got a bill for $1,300 when
normally his bill was $25 a
month. And yeah, again, a whole other story there.
I didn't realize there was more of a SCPPA connection there.
That's something I should look into it.
You know, your experiences here.
You live in Riverside County.
What do you think is happening here?
Is this just insiders protecting each other?
You know, we have to be careful about what we suggest that
people have done here.
But what do you think has allowed this?
Is it just insider-ism?
Jason Hunter:
I think there's a component to that.
I think the larger, but that doesn't explain years later when
you've got a completely new city council,
and Mr.
Wright hasn't worked here now for eight years.
He's not that heavily involved in the community.
He's a little bit involved in the community, but not heavily
involved.
So these new people wouldn't even know the man that that well,
or his boyfriend, who by the way, when he
was found to have that conflict of interest was removed from the
internal auditing department at the city.
He was transferred. He was given a lateral transfer at the same
salary to another division within the city.
That was his punishment.
Jason Fordney:
Right.
Jason Hunter:
And so what do I think is going on?
I think that the city doesn't like bad PR, and they're willing
in
order to get bad press, they are willing to overlook
accountability.
Assigning individual accountability, which I keep telling them
is a bad trade, because it just, in my opinion,
assures that these type of scurrilous activities will continue
to happen because the bad actors will know
there's never any accountability assigned for doing these
things.
Jason Fordney:
Yeah. And it's really only a result of your tenacity here, which
has been pretty incredible.
Absent that, nothing really would have happened here in terms of
looking into this.
So that's to your credit.
Jason Hunter:
Yeah, well, at least they've changed the policies.
I can say at least that one win has been is at least they've
changed the policy.
I mean, if I would have known back in 2012 when I was making my
original complaints, the saga that this would turn into, a nine
year journey, I'm not sure I would have taken it on to begin
with, quite frankly.
Jason Fordney:
Yeah, I know.
I know how you feel.
And I have talked to the current SCPPA executive director or he
was a year ago, and he did talk to me and he said, you know, we
support transparency.
We support the audit.
We'll be as helpful as we can be.
Jason Hunter:
Sorry. The other thing that came out of it, Jason, was that the
City of Riverside more or less has pulled
out of SCPPA as far as those types of activities that I was
describing were not even allowed under the SCPPA Charter.
The city now is doing those entirely over internally at the
utility itself and running it through the city
council and the Board of Public Utilities.
So obviously the city is at least a little bit concerned about
some of the objections I raised to even not just blowing through
the appropriations limits and the spending limits, but just what
kind of activities were even being conducted over at SCPPA.
So there have been some changes, but of course I always say, you
know, that's great, and that's half the battle.
The other half of the battle, which always seems to be, they
always seem to avoid over at the City of Riverside is
accountability. There's been no accountability.
And I will continue to pursue this, Jason, until there is.
I'm all in now. It's been nine years.
Jason Fordney:
Yeah, it's really fascinating.
I appreciate you speaking with me today.
And, you know, when the audit comes out, it will be very
interesting to see what they find.
And what I was told by RPU is that the auditing firm requested
more time.
Still processing your comments from April, I guess.
But yeah, that would be the next step here, and we'll be
covering it.
Jason Hunter:
Well, I must have had some pretty impactful statements if it's
taking them an extra six months to address them, I hope.
Jason Fordney:
Yeah, it is curious.
And they approved more money for the audit.
I don't know what...the original amount was $115,000, I think.
The wheels are turning, however slowly, and we'll see what
happens.
But thanks very much, Jason.
We'll be in touch.
I'll continue to cover this and good luck.
Jason Hunter:
Thank you very much, Jason.
I'm glad that your organization is putting a spotlight on this
problem, because I always say, listen, if it's going on in
Riverside, it's probably going on at publicly-owned utilities
across the state of California and maybe across the country.
Jason Fordney:
Maybe so, but, you know, that's why we're here.
So that's what we do.
Jason Hunter:
All right. Have a great afternoon.
Outro:
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