It was interesting—maybe even enlightening—to hear how City Controller Ron Galperin arranged to have Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Atty. Mike Feuer join him for a press conference last month blasting the head of the big union representing Department of Water and Power employees.

None of them are known as flamethrowers. On the contrary, it’s hard to get the three to say anything that would make a headline, even on page 3 of the Times LATEXTRA section. So it was noteworthy that the mild-mannered trio stood together to challenge the ferocious Brian D’Arcy, who runs the DWP’s largest employee union, Local 18 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical workers. He also influences big decisions at city hall with his combative personality and his union’s campaign contributions.

The cooperation between Garcetti, Galperin and Feuer is unusual at city hall, where elected officials tend to guard their turf and don’t like to share glory.

At the news conference, Galperin announced he had issued subpoenas to force D’Arcy to account for the spending of $40 million given by the union and the department to two nonprofit organizations created a decade ago to improve worker-management relations after years of turmoil.

D’Arcy co-manages the organizations—the Joint Training Institute and the Joint Safety Institute--with Ron Nichols, the DWP general manager, who recently resigned. The money comes from rates paid by DWP customers. Despite the efforts of the Los Angeles Times and the commissioners in charge of the department, neither Nichols nor D’Arcy has explained how the money has been spent. Nichols has given Galperin a box of documents but D’Arcy has declined to cooperate.

Just how this money is spent is one of city hall’s great mysteries.

At stake, Galperin told me, was the principle “that if you spend money that comes from the people, you should know how it is spent. And the performance, what did we get for the money? Did we see improvements in safety? Did we see improvements in training?”

Galperin asked City Attorney Feuer how much power he had to issue subpoenas for the records. Plenty, replied Feuer, and, he added that the Police Department is authorized to deliver the subpoenas to D’Arcy.

“I talked to the mayor, “ Galperin said. “We have a regular meeting, there was a long list of agenda items and this happened to be one of them.”

After getting Feuer’s opinion, “ we were not intending to do a press conference but we got so many calls from media,” Galperin said that he decided quickly to hold one. His staff talked to Garcetti and Feuer aides and the joint session was quickly arranged.

Galperin said it was important “for the three of us have a unified front on this, (to say) just trying to stonewall the city is not acceptable. A real change in city hall, three officers collaborating…”

Garcetti, Feuer, and Galperin are the only city officers elected citywide. It will be interesting and enlightening to see what will happen if they continue to work together.

Waiting for a train at Metro Center Station in downtown Los Angeles—the platform full of Blue Line and Expo Line riders--I wondered at the Los Angeles 2020 Commission’s cool dismissal of a mass transit system that is growing into a real asset .

Lack of enthusiasm dripped from the report of the commission, headed by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor and former Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner, who were appointed by City Council President Herb Wesson: “Even if all the ambitious and expensive mass transit projects underway are successfully completed, they will simply keep things from getting any worse. In the meantime, the economic and human costs of unchecked congestion compound on a daily basis.” I looked around at my many fellow riders. Without the Blue Line to Long Beach and the Expo Line to the Westside, they would be driving or riding buses on circuitous routes, causing more of the congestion that the commission decries.

Living in the heart of congestion country, near Olympic Boulevard and Veteran Avenue—Wilshire Boulevard and Veteran is the city’s busiest intersection--I think I know a major reason for the congestion---job growth, which the commission says isn’t happening. High tech and the entertainment business have created a job-producing corridor along Olympic. Same thing is happening along Culver Boulevard and in the Playa del Rey area. Job-heavy UCLA and the airport also bring in residents and traffic. With jobs come population growth. This pokes a hole in the commission’s contention that L.A. is a job-killing city.

I jumped on this small part of the report because I’m a big transit booster and know something about the subject, having written about public buses and trains for many years. I was disappointed that the commission took such a superficial and wrong-headed look at so important a subject.

The most important part of the commission report concerned city employee pensions. The commission said city employment has dropped 12 percent since 2004, yet spending on pensions is up 250 percent and health care spending is up almost 80 percent. The implication is that L.A. is on the way to becoming another Detroit.

Interestingly, the commission embraced the analysis of blogger Jack Humphreville, a fiscally conservative Neighborhood Council budget activist. Humphreville, who writes the LA Watchdog blog for Citywatch LA, has long maintained that the city is not putting aside enough money to fund these benefits. He supports a proposed state ballot measure that would give local governments more power to take away benefits. Unions oppose it

In the next 90 days, the commission will make recommendations after meetings and hearings—in public, I hope—to decide what to do about the employee benefits—reduce them, maintain them or gradually revise them through collective bargaining. Will commissioners follow the blood-sweat-and-tears path recommended by pension cutters? And what will Mayor Eric Garcetti do about it?

Pity Mayor Eric Garcetti. Judging from the news coverage, Bill de Blasio of New York, inaugurated on New Year’s Day, is now America’s most famous mayor. But what is happening to the mayor of the second most populous city, toiling away for months with dwindling attention from the news media?

Maybe Mayor Garcetti likes it that way. As Rick Orlov wrote in the Daily News last month, “In his first six months in office, Mayor Eric Garcetti has brought a low-key cool to the job that presents a sharp contrast to the heat and flash of his predecessor, Antonio Villaraigosa.”

Villaraigosa had major accomplishments in his eight years, notably winning financial support for a mass transit system that is expanding, getting people out of their cars and creating jobs. But included in the “heat and flash” he generated was an affinity for publicity and the spotlight, an embrace of celebrities, and his romances. The cautious Garcetti probably doesn’t want to be another Antonio, always swinging for homeruns and sometimes striking out.

Still, many of us are curious to know what’s happening in city hall, especially with our tax dollars. Looking for information, I checked in with Garcetti’s web site, which is designed to give residents the straight story on what’s going on the administration. The web site says, “ The priority areas represented in the tiles below are key to the success of Mayor Garcetti's "Back to Basics" agenda.…This website tracks City Hall performance in key areas. “ He announced the web site in October and I find it as vague as it was when it was introduced.

Tourism is slightly up. But where are the tourists spending and staying? How much are the taxpayer- subsidized luxury hotels at LA Live contributing to the economy? Shipping is down at the port. Why? Furthermore, traffic on the web site was down from 332,959 in August to 301,915 in September. Perhaps Los Angeles is giving up on it as a source of information.

One thing that might explain the difference between New York and Los Angeles city halls is the news coverage. The Los Angeles press corps is smaller than the New York contingent. I got a rundown from Orlov of the Daily News and David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times: Zahniser and Catherine Saillant cover for the Times from inside city hall while Michael Finnegan, working across the street in the Times building, watches the mayor; Orlov, covering news and writing a weekly column, and Dakota Smith, report for the Daily News; City News Service, supplying news to media around the area, is on the scene; Alice Walton of KPCC and Claudia Peschiutta of KNX cover for radio, as do a few other reporters.

But that’s a small band of journalists for a city government that is sprawling, intricate and packed with secretive politicians and bureaucrats. The newspapers also have been hurt by a cost-cutting major reduction of space for news. And the Times, usually squeezing city hall news into the odd and truncated LATEXTRA section or putting it only on the web site, has taken much impact out of the coverage.

In contrast, New York Mayor de Blasio is confronted with three reporters each from the Times, the Daily News and the Post, according to the web site Capital New York. In addition, the Associated Press, Reuters, Newsday and the Wall Street Journal have journalists in city hall, as do some web sites. Fiercely competing against each other, they aren’t likely to give the new mayor the luxury of the kind of laid-back first few months Garcetti has enjoyed.

But that’s exactly what we need in Los Angeles city hall. Without such coverage and more visible activity by the mayor, those who want to know what’s going on are kept in ignorance and democracy suffers.