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WORKER SAFETY - When city bureaucracy delays action on known safety threats, it’s not just employees who are at risk, it’s public trust and safety itself.
In Los Angeles, the largest municipal utility in the nation and its network of sister agencies employ tens of thousands of people who keep the city running, repairing lines, maintaining fleets, managing infrastructure, and serving the public around the clock. Meanwhile behind the machinery and the mission, a quieter problem has taken hold: The tendency of large public institutions to delay or deflect when credible safety threats arise inside their own walls.
This problem is not theoretical. Just recently, at a City Sanitation wastewater facility, a disgruntled employee shot and killed his supervisor before taking his own life. The incident shocked the city, devastated a work crew, and underscored the stakes of ignoring behavioral warning signs. While every case is unique, tragedies like this highlight a systemic issue within Los Angeles’ public institutions. When threats linger unaddressed, consequences escalate.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, along with other city departments, are not unique in facing the occasional internal conflict that escalates beyond a personnel issue. What is unique is how long such conflicts can linger without decisive resolution. Employees describe lengthy chains of emails, overlapping jurisdictions between Human Resources, Security Services, and Labor Relations, and a culture in which every division waits for another to act first. By the time a problem reaches the City Attorney’s office or the Board of Civil Service Commissioners, months or years may have passed. In that time, fear, rumor, and frustration grow unchecked.
At the heart of this pattern is a misplaced belief that delay equals due process. City managers, often navigating union contracts, legal counsel, and departmental policies, sometimes choose procedural safety over physical safety. Instead of removing or retraining a problem employee, agencies opt for temporary transfers, quiet settlements, or endless “reviews.” While these measures may protect the City from immediate grievance filings, they leave employees feeling unprotected and unheard. For a department like LADWP, whose crews handle heavy equipment, energized facilities, and high-risk materials, such inaction is more than administrative slowness, it is a breach of the employer’s duty of care.
The tendency to move rather than resolve is sometimes reinforced by the very organizations meant to defend worker interests. In some city unions representing frontline employees, leadership has responded to safety complaints by requesting reassignments for the accused rather than demanding accountability or investigation. These transfers may appear to restore peace in one workplace but simply relocate the hazard to another. When representation substitutes mobility for responsibility, it undermines the safety of all members, including those the union purports to protect.
California law makes that duty explicit. Under Labor Code §6400, employers must provide a safe and healthful workplace. Cal/OSHA’s Injury and Illness Prevention Program (§3203) requires immediate investigation of any reported hazard or threat, and Labor Code §1102.5 forbids retaliation against employees who report unsafe conditions or misuse of authority. These statutes were designed to ensure that the public sector lives by the same safety standards it enforces in the private one. Yet when reports are treated as inconveniences or career risks, those protections exist only on paper.
Across Los Angeles, workers in multiple departments recount similar experiences. Reports of intimidation or verbal threats are met with reassignment rather than resolution. Supervisors are advised to “document and monitor” instead of mitigate or resolve. In some offices, employees are told to lock doors or work remotely until tensions subside – temporary fixes that acknowledge danger without confronting it. The underlying message is clear – the system prioritizes administrative comfort over employee security.
This culture of delay carries real costs. Every unaddressed warning chips away at morale and ultimately public trust. Coworkers lose confidence that leadership will protect them; taxpayers lose confidence that their government can manage its own workforce. The City’s record of settlements and workers’ compensation payouts in recent years underscores how inaction eventually becomes expensive. It is cheaper and safer to act early, yet the bureaucratic instinct seems to be to wait.
Experts in risk management call this “institutional inertia.” It is not malice, it is habit. Agencies learn to avoid controversy, and over time delay and avoidance become policy. The result is an organization that can process a purchase order faster than a personnel threat or a problematic employee. Documents move, decisions do not.
To its credit, LADWP and other departments have internal safety programs and training requirements, but those frameworks are only as strong as the willingness of its supervisors to enforce them. When an incident triggers a threat-assessment recommendation, that assessment must carry mandatory follow-through, not optional review. City departments should never have the discretion to ignore or postpone evaluations that concern employee safety. Creating independent review panels, staffed by experts outside departmental hierarchies, would help ensure that legitimate warnings receive timely attention.
Oversight must also extend beyond the city itself. The State of California has a vested interest in how its largest municipalities handle employee behaviors as well as workplace safety. The California Whistleblower Protection Act (Gov. Code §8547) and related statutes already allow employees to report violations to state authorities when internal systems fail. Too few workers know they have that right. Expanding awareness of state-level reporting options and guaranteeing protection from retaliation, would give employees the confidence to speak up before a crisis develops.
Public accountability is not punishment, it is prevention. When agencies face scrutiny, they tend to strengthen their processes. When they operate in silence, even well-intentioned managers become trapped by the status quo. Los Angeles has an opportunity to lead the State by example in creating a transparent, data-driven system that tracks workplace-safety complaints, their resolution times, and corrective outcomes. Publishing that data annually, much like police-use-of-force or environmental reports, would transform safety from a reactive measure into a civic metric.
There is precedent for this approach. Following several high-profile incidents in the early 2000s, state universities implemented independent “threat management teams” with direct reporting lines to campus leadership and Cal/OSHA liaisons. Those programs reduced both incidents and liability. Los Angeles could adopt a similar model citywide, ensuring that every serious report triggers an impartial review.
Critics might argue that such reforms add bureaucracy to an already complex system. The current process, marked by overlapping committees, endless documentation, and fear of legal missteps, is bureaucracy without accountability. True reform simplifies decision-making: One report, one timeline, one responsible body. In safety, speed matters.
The deeper issue is cultural. Public employees enter government service believing that integrity and safety are foundational. When they see credible threats ignored or whistleblowers sidelined, that belief erodes. In a department the size of LADWP, morale and trust are as vital as transformers, turbines and valves. A workforce that feels unsafe cannot perform at its best; a city that disregards safety warnings cannot claim to serve its employees or residents responsibly.
City leaders often speak of modernization in terms of infrastructure: Smart grids, renewable energy and sustainable water systems. It is time to apply the same urgency to modernizing workplace governance. Accountability, transparency, and the protection of those who report danger are as essential to the City’s future as any new substation or reservoir. A culture that values delay over decisiveness endangers not just employees, but the reputation and reliability of the institutions that keep Los Angeles functioning.
The call for oversight should not be viewed as criticism but as civic maintenance. Just as engineers test equipment to prevent failure, government must test its own systems to ensure resilience. The City Council, the Mayor’s Office, and State oversight agencies should jointly review how threat-assessment and workplace-safety protocols are handled across departments, including LADWP. The goal is not to single out one case but to verify that procedures actually protect people. Transparency here will encourage every employee, from electricians to analysts, to trust that reporting a problem will lead to resolution, not vacillation, non-action, or retaliation.
California’s workforce deserves that assurance. State regulators, inspectors, and auditors should look beyond incident statistics to the administrative behaviors that allow danger to persist. Silence and delay are choices, not inevitabilities. Empowering employees to speak without fear and requiring agencies to act without hesitation to a diligent end would align public practice with public promise.
The culture of delay should not be immutable. It begins to change grow and evolve the moment leaders decide that waiting or passing the problem on to the next supervisor or section is no longer the safe option. The health of Los Angeles and the integrity of its government depend on that decision being made immediately!
(Editor’s note: The author is a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employee. Some identifying details have been withheld for privacy and safety reasons. This op-ed was written to raise awareness of systemic workplace-safety and accountability concerns within public institutions and to encourage employees statewide to exercise their rights under California’s whistleblower protections.)
