Shortly after the FBI raided the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power headquarters, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that utility’s manager David Wright would be stepping down earlier than planned and that Marty Adams would be stepping up as interim general manager.

Adams has been with the LADWP for more than 30 years.

He says he loves to see the work they do go from its plans to its execution.

“I grew up as a water guy – I love the water,” Adams said. “The department had so many opportunities, different places to work, different kinds of engineering to do.”

Many of the problems the LADWP is currently facing stem from the overbilling situation. Adams says when they launched the new billing system back in 2013, “it wasn’t ready to go and so we had a number of problems.”

A class action lawsuit was filed in 2015.

“We had no intention to collect money over and above what people owed us and to hold on to that. That class action suit resulted in us guaranteeing that we would pay everyone back 100 cents on the dollar, every penny we owed that we would give back to our customers,” he said.

He said they now have everything back on track and are working to regain trust with their customers.

“We are as eager as anyone to find out if there’s something going on beyond what we understood we were trying to fix,” Adams said. “My goal is to assist the FBI any way we can, as well as the court system, to make sure that, if there’s a problem it’s uncovered, we know what it is and if it’s something we need to fix, that we have not already addressed, that we’re getting on that.”

The company is working with Mayor Garcetti to use an Inspector General to make sure they are following processes and performing audits.

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