LISA COLLINS Editor-in-Chief
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erhaps it is LADWP Board President Cynthia McClainHill’s law firm motto that best encapsulates her meteoric rise on L.A.’s civic and political landscape. “There are forces beyond economic at work in today’s marketplace,” it reads. “We know how to use them.” It is a bold statement from a woman who is known for making them and most importantly
L.A. Focus/July 2021
can back them up. Says McClain-Hill, “There are not that many people that look like me who have been willing to get in the arena and fight it out and have learned how to navigate in a way that can move an agenda forward”. Her prowess at moving an agenda forward has landed her at the helm of the nation’s largest municipal utility– the L.A. Department of Water & Power (DWP) with more than 9,000 employees and an annual budget of $6 billion. In a statement announcing her nomination, Mayor Eric Garcetti said, “Cynthia never stops fighting to move L.A. forward – and I know that she will bring those same values to the job of overseeing a DWP that powers our households, empowers ratepayers, and leads the charge toward a sustainable, clean energy future.” In an L.A. Daily News op-ed entitled, “Who Should Be the Next Mayor of Los Angeles?”, her name was mentioned among the civic leaders who would make an extremely effective steward. And she has the credentials to prove it, from National President of the National Association of Women Business Owners to appointments on the California Coastal Commission and California Fair Practice Commissions to the Board of the L.A. Police Commission and as founder of Strategic Counsel, a land use law firm that is well-versed on public policy and government regulations. Many feel, however, that it is at the helm of the L.A. Department of Water & Power, that McClain-Hill will make the most impact and at the top of her list of priorities is racial equity. “When I joined the department, I knew that it was a coveted place to work in the city of Los Angeles,” states McClain-Hill. “I also knew that there were people that called it ‘the department of white peo-
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ple.’” The latter was something she set out to change, and the timing couldn’t have been better. In the wake of social unrest in the summer of 2020, Mayor Eric Garcetti issued Executive Director No. 27. This Directive instructed all City departments to create a Racial Equity Action Plan to foster efforts to promote equity throughout Los Angeles. “That caused the walls to come crashing down at DWP,” McClain-Hill recalls. “Not only did the board get seriously engaged in these issues, but we literally went into the department and surveyed our entire department about racial equity.” Determined not to just perform the perfunctory check the box report, McClain-Hill convinced her board colleagues, the LADWP General Manager, senior leadership, as well as union leaders that the department needed to have an outside entity perform a comprehensive analysis on the culture and operations of DWP. A team of minority consultants from Dakota Communications and Cordoba Corporation led the effort to produce the top to bottom analysis, which included focus groups, interviews, and an employee survey. The report–which was responded to by an unprecedented 3,400 DWP employees, about one third of the entire workforce– revealed that DWP had no real enforcement policies to punish rogue managers, supervisors, or employees for discriminatory behavior. Thus, harassment and retaliation of whistle blowers persisted. Focus groups revealed that 53% of staff and 50% of supervisors felt DWP management did not take appropriate action in response to incidents of discrimination. African Americans fared much worse than other ethnic groups. Nearly 40% of Black survey participants felt they had been discriminated against for career opportunities. Fifty-nine (59%) of Black survey participants witnessed discrimination compared to only 36% of total survey participants witnessing discrimination. Additionally, there were currently no Black executives in management. “On the day the mayor issued his racial equity directive, I was the only African-American that sat on the senior executive board and noted that was an issue the department needed to change,” McClain Hill adds. “The mayor ordered that every department create a racial equity officer, but what we've done is to create an office of diversity, equity and inclusion with significant resources and as many as 30 people reporting to it.” She pauses for a moment. “We've got to change institutions
I've learned over the years to push the envelope and not care what other people think, but I didn't start out that way. [Instead it was] being cautious, being in the background, supporting other people, pushing them forward, letting them take credit. Been there done that. Being resilient is probably my greatest gift and I've had to lean on it a lot. You don't regret the things that you try and fail. You regret the things you don't try.
