Audit finds DWP chief’s yard to be overflowing

As city leaders urge residents to trim energy and water usage amid the sweltering summer months, a home audit of the chief of L.A.’s Department of Water and Power has found that even the champion of conservation is not doing enough to cut back.

Auditors last month found that lawn sprinklers at General Manager H. David Nahai’s 6,000-square-foot Deep Canyon Drive home had come on every single night for more than a year – summer or winter, rain or shine.

The watering resulted in about a foot of subsurface moisture and boosted the general manager’s average water consumption – 36,185 gallons a month, or 1,190 gallons a day – higher than most of his neighbors. . .

When the Bully Sits in the Next Cubicle

An eye roll, a glare, a dismissive snort — these are the tactics of the workplace bully. They don’t sound like much, but that’s why they are so insidious. How do you complain to human resources that your boss is picking on you? Who cares that a co-worker won’t return your phone calls?

Bullying in the workplace is surprisingly common. In a survey released last fall, 37 percent of American workers said they had experienced bullying on the job, according to the research firm Zogby International.

Unlike the playground bully, who often resorts to physical threats, the work bully sets out on a course of constant but subtle harassment. It may start with a belittling comment at a staff meeting. Later it becomes gossip to co-workers and forgetting to invite someone to an important work event. If the bully is a supervisor, victims may be stripped of critical duties, then accused of not doing their job, says Gary Namie, founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group based in Bellingham, Wash. . .

One big drug test for L.A.: sewage analysis

Which city uses more cocaine: Los Angeles or London? Is heroin a big problem in San Diego? And has Ecstasy emerged in rural America?

Environmental scientists are beginning to use an unsavory new tool—raw sewage—to paint an accurate portrait of drug abuse in communities. Like one big, citywide urinalysis, tests at municipal sewage plants in many areas of the United States and Europe, including Los Angeles County, have detected illicit drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana.

Law enforcement officials have long sought a way to come up with reliable and verifiable calculations of narcotics use, to identify new trends and formulate policies. Surveys, the backbone of drug-use estimates, are only as reliable as the people who answer them. But sewage does not lie. . .

States do fed’s jobs on immigration

Immigration reform has become persona non grata in this town ever since comprehensive bill failed last spring. But as silent as lawmakers here are on the subject, the louder it’s getting in the states.

And if you look back to other major issues, maybe that’s what has to happen for lawmakers here to actually do something on the issue.

In the 1990s, the drumbeat for welfare reform didn’t lead to federal action until state after state passed the kind of welfare-to-work laws that President Clinton finally signed. States were beginning to demand concrete educational standards long before the Bush administration championed No Child Left Behind. . .