Amid the fuss about the private outside lawyers hired by City Atty. Mike Feuer to litigate a big case, I wonder why there wasn't anyone among his office's more than 500 lawyers who could do the work at city pay.

I bet Feuer wishes he had gone down the hall for a city lawyer instead of employing New York attorney Paul Paradis and Beverly Hills lawyer Paul Kiesel for a lawsuit against the big consulting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which implemented a disastrous Department of Water and Power billing system in 2013. The rollout resulted in hundreds of thousands of DWP customers being overbilled by $67 million. Already mad about previous DWP foul-ups, customers sued.

It's an incredibly complicated lawsuit and would take me considerable space to explain.
What I have puzzled about is why Feuer went outside his office for legal help. His decision created a furor and may have interfered with his thoughts about running for mayor.

The whole idea of the city attorney hiring expensive private lawyers has always mystified me. I feel the same about the county counsel, another public agency that hires many private lawyers, known as outside counsel, to represent Los Angeles County in lawsuits and other legal matters. Much of the $145 million the county paid out for lawsuits last year went to private firms.

Why not give the work to lawyers on the public payroll?

I asked my friend Bob Stern, co-author of the state political reform act, former chief counsel for the state fair election practices commission and an expert on the confluence of public and private law.

"Some cases," he said, "require a specialized attorney." When the election commission was getting started, he said, it lacked an experienced legal staff to handle groundbreaking enforcement cases. The city and the county, he said may be confronted with complicated cases involving millions of dollars and needs real experts in the field. Or their cases may rise to the U.S. Supreme Court, the major league of legal practice, home of complex cases and impatient justices.

The first question someone in Feuer's position should ask, Stern said, is there anyone in the office who have handled such cases in the past or who has the talent to undertake it?

Those are good questions for Feuer. Did he search his office for talent in the Department of Water and Power billing case? How did he pick the outside counsel he hired?

It's not as though the DWP is new to the city attorney's office. The city attorney has been representing water and power since L.A. stole the water from the Owens Valley early in the 20th century. There must be someone in that storehouse of water and power law who knows how to handle a billing dispute.

As always, the discussion of homelessness left me frustrated.

City Atty. Mike Feuer was his usual knowledgeable self as he explained what he'd been doing to combat Los Angeles' seemingly incurable affliction. And it made sense. He has sent out teams to interact with homeless on the street. He has tried to help them navigate the maze of laws that are designed to protect them and the residents who scorn and fear them. He has convened meetings of law enforcement and other justice system officials.

But as I heard Feuer speak to the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum on Tuesday, his positive words had a too-familiar sound. Like other reporters writing about homelessness, I had heard them before from the women and men who lead the vast number of government and non-profit agencies given the job of getting people off the streets.

I've never been able to get my arms around the myriad agencies involved in the effort. They are generally run by well intentioned and hopefully smart people, extending from Mayor Eric Garcetti's administration to little-known organizations. But there are so many of them, and they express themselves in such a complex way, that it's hard to sort out what they do.

For example, the master agency, supposedly in charge of it all, the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority (LAHSA) hands out more than $300 million a year in federal, state, county and city funds for shelter and services to the homeless, among other funds. It was created years ago to organize the county and city bureaucracies into one massive fight on homelessness.

Rather than leading us with a Roosevelt-like battle cry, LAHSA explains its work in high bureaucratese. From its web site: "Through LAHSA, funding, program design, outcomes assessment and technical assistance are provided to more than 100 nonprofit partner agencies" that assist the homeless. All the voters know is that they approved a huge bond issue and a tax increase to provide housing and services for the homeless and have seen no results.

I asked Feuer about the multiplicity of agencies, including his own, putting out plans while the number of homeless increase. Why doesn't someone "knock heads" and come up with a cure-all plan?

"There is more than the knocking of heads" needed in the process, he said.

As an example, he cited the increasingly intense controversy over where to build temporary and permanent housing for the homeless. He said there was a "need to streamline the process" through which sites are selected. But Feuer also talked about a dispute in Venice where efforts to "streamline" has stirred huge neighborhood opposition. He praised Garcetti and Councilman Mike Bonin for their efforts to build housing on city owned land. The project, however, has been a target for local NIMBYs, who also berate Garcetti and Bonin for the large number of homeless living on Venice streets.

You'd think Feuer would want a vacation from such heat when his two terms end in 2021. But, no. He obviously believes he can succeed whether so many others have failed. Asked by a member of the Current Affairs Forum audience about running for mayor, he said it is "something I am looking at very seriously."

The next mayor, he said, must have the "ability to lead and inspire," and be willing to take risks. All this is true. But such words are also a truism, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "a statement that is so obviously true that it is almost not worth saying."