Springs Utilities CEO Heads West After Contributing to New LA Mayor’s Campaign | tidings
Former Springs Utilities CEO Aram Benyamin will become chief operating officer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) — the agency where he worked for 30 years before coming to Colorado Springs — the department confirmed. Indy.
although newspapers cited a “Thursday news release” in first reporting the news on Nov. 18, an LADWP spokesman tells Indy that no release had been issued up to that date.
In any case, Benyamin was hired after he contributed $1,405 in three separate donations to Karen Bass, a veteran Democratic congresswoman who became LA’s first woman mayor-elect on Wednesday, Nov. 16.
Benyamin made two donations on Sept. 3 totaling $1,005 and gave Bass’ campaign another $400 on Oct. 5. Campaign finance records show he listed his address when he made those contributions as that of a home he bought in 2005 for $1.2 million in Tarzana, Calif., which is about 20 miles from Malibu, according to online property records. real estate. (Benyamin also owns a home in the Cordera subdivision in northeast Colorado Springs and an office building at 415 E. Pikes Peak Ave.)
LADWP would not reveal when he will start working there or his salary until he is on the job. Benyamin will report to 38-year LADWP General Manager and Chief Engineer Marty Adams. Online salary information for LADWP shows Adams’ total compensation was $430,524 in 2021.
Benyamin was paid $480,000 a year as CEO of Springs Utilities and earlier this year turned down a raise before it was offered.
Utilities Board Chairman Wayne Williams says Indy that Benyamin’s last pay date is Dec. 1, and that he will collect pay for unused vacation time, under state law, and for half of his unused sick pay, per policy, thereafter. Those totals were not immediately available.
Williams says Benyamin will start his new job in LA “soon” and that Utilities Chief Operating Officer Travas Deal has been named acting CEO effective Dec. 1. Williams says the salary range for the new CEO is $450,000 to $520,000. A consultant has not been hired to help with the statewide search, he says, and the Public Utilities Board expects to name a new CEO in the first quarter of 2023.
Benyamin contributed $2,500 to Williams’ mayoral campaign account on Feb. 7 and another $1,000 on May 9, campaign records show.
Benyamin was hired by Utilities in 2015 as general manager of energy supply. He was promoted to CEO in October 2018.
He was expelled from the LADWP in 2014 because of his close ties to the electrical workers union, according to media reports. Benyamin had also endorsed challenger Eric Garcetti, who was elected mayor and served until Bass was elected on November 16.
like Indy previously reported, Benyamin was placed on administrative leave in 2014 after acting as a trustee of two nonprofit training and security institutes overseen by a local union that resisted the city comptroller’s efforts to obtain an accounting of how they were spent 40 million dollars, the media reported.
In his 2015 report, the comptroller said the trusts operated with “weak oversight and inadequate financial controls”. Many expenses had “questionable links to the missions and purposes of the trusts” and the trusts “appear to have a cavalier attitude towards the use of public money”.
The audit also found that trust administrators used trust credit cards to gas up personal vehicles and paid LADWP employees to conduct training courses, an apparent violation of the trust agreement.
The trusts also “repeatedly entered into contracts with non-competitive bids” and when they expired, “simply executed change orders or issued new contracts without soliciting competitive bids.”
In July 2020, under benyamin’s leadership, Utilities hired consultant The Broadband Group to do a feasibility study on building a large fiber backbone network, citing a “not to be exceeded” figure of $244,940. Nine months later the scope of the project was expanded and the value of the contract had increased 300-fold to $73.5 million.
Benyamin’s tenure at Utilities saw efforts to shift the city’s energy supply away from coal and toward renewables. The downtown Drake coal-fired power plant has closed and the city has moved toward solar and wind power, but also relies heavily on natural gas.
Most recently, Utilities is at the center of a controversy over how it will determine whether to extend water service to new developments, sparked by an annexation application by La Plata Communities for 3,200 acres known as Amara. It is located in the southeast of the city and is surrounded on three sides by the city of Shatërvan. After initially saying it had enough water, Utilities later proposed a new ordinance that would disqualify Amara from annexation. The ordinance is under study.