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THE EASTSIDER - On January 29, 2025, the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) in dramatic fashion released its embattled General Manager Adel Hagekhalil, replacing him with Assistant General Manager Deven Upadhyay. The move culminated months of torturous Board deliberations, in which various employee complaints against Hagekhalil were considered and investigated, including one from Chief Financial Officer Katano Kasaine, MWD’s highest ranking Black and female executive. Hagekhalil himself had been on a paid leave of absence since last June.
According to sources within MWD, the Board right up till the end was attempting to negotiate an amicable separation with Hagekhalil, with some Directors advocating a cash payment for him in excess of $3 million. Fortunately for the water ratepayers of Southern California, no such boondoggle agreement was reached.
Instead, a presumably more modest “last, best and final offer” was presented to Hagekhalil late in the afternoon of January 29th. When Hagekhalil rejected it, he was summarily released, with MWD announcing matter-of-factly in its press release:
“The Metropolitan Water District Board of Directors has exercised its contractual right to terminate General Manager Adel Hagekhalil’s employment under the terms of his employment contract. The change is effective immediately.”
Certainly, the Kasaine investigation, which resulted in a finding that she was treated disparately by Hagekhalil because she is female, was the final nail in the proverbial coffin. But multiple sources who I spoke to for this article say the seeds of his demise were planted almost immediately after his arrival at MWD in July 2021.
HOW DID IT ALL GO SO WRONG?
Hagekhalil was hired by MWD to much fanfare. Following a string of unflattering articles in the Los Angeles Times in 2020 alleging complaints of discrimination against female employees, as well as a report from the California State Auditor claiming flaws with how it investigated complaints, MWD was banking on Hagekhalil to create a culture change. With his oft-repeated, rah-rah mantra of “We Are One,” the new GM promised to do just that.
And while Hagekhalil’s water credentials were relatively thin (sources familiar with the recruitment say he ranked dead last amongst finalists for MWD’s top job), his commitment to pursuing renewable water initiatives pleased environmental groups opposed to MWD’s traditional business model of transported water. So, what could possibly have gone wrong?
For starters, Darren Reese.
I’ve written about this employee many times in my columns, though until now not by name. Darren was an employee in MWD’s Desert area near the Colorado River, who had been the victim of persistent discrimination because of his race (he’s white) and gender (male). The perpetrator, a female union steward, repeatedly called him and others names like “fucking white male,” telling them that “the only reason you’re here is because you’re a white guy.”
And yet, because she’d managed to work her way into Hagekhalil’s good graces, managers were told that she could not be punished. Hagekhalil even went so far as promoting her to MWD’s newly created DEI Office. Reese, on the other hand, couldn’t even get MWD to honestly investigate the complaint he’d filed.
So, he sued. The result four years later? MWD has amassed legal fees of upwards of $900,000, according to a recent agenda item of the Board’s Legal and Claims subcommittee. That plus an undisclosed though reportedly favorable settlement for Reese reached on the eve of trial, means that just one isolated instance of Hagekhalil’s stupidity cost MWD well over a million dollars.
But it didn’t stop there. As chronicled in my columns back in 2023, Hagekhalil, perhaps still thinking that he was back at the corrupt club otherwise known as Mayor Garcetti’s Los Angeles, went on a spree of handing out jobs and promotions to favored employees like so much Halloween candy. All of which flew right in the face of MWD’s own merit-based hiring rules. This reached its nadir with the 2023 hiring of Hagekhalil’s consultant buddy and personal friend Mohsen Mortada to be his new “Chief of Staff,” a $423,000 a year giveaway job in the midst of a budget shortfall. (Mr. Mortada still holds that job. For the moment.)
And why wasn’t the HR Department speaking up about all of this? Well in early 2023 Hagekhalil fired MWD’s long-serving HR Director Diane Pitmann. A settlement allowed Hagekhalil to label the move as a mutual parting of the ways. But multiple sources close to the situation confirmed long ago that this was just a way for MWD to avoid a costly lawsuit that it was going to lose. So Hagekhalil had free reign, with a complicit Board and neutered HR Department unable or unwilling to stop him.
MEANWHILE, ADEL WASN’T PLAYING IN PEORIA
All of this caused Hagekhalil’s standing amongst employees to plummet. MWD workers are a smart bunch, highly skilled, highly trained. It’s a group that knows its work and can’t be bullshitted. And all this time, they were not buying what Hagekhalil was selling.
In employee “town hall” meetings throughout 2023 and 2024, Hagekhalil kept banging the “We Are One” drum loudly, but numerous employees who I spoke to then and now all confirmed…it was falling on deaf ears. First, they could all see for themselves the culture of cronyism and corruption that had taken root under Hagekhalil.
Then, Hagekhalil’s lack of water expertise was abundantly clear to anyone who listened to him for longer than a minute. Whereas previous GM’s Jeff Kightlinger, Dennis Underwood and Ron Gastelum were known as industry leaders fluent in the intricacies of water policy, Hagekhalil, who had no comparable experience during his time with the City of LA, would simply repeat talking points (think again, “We Are One”), or defer to expert staff like Assistant GM Upadhyay.
HOW IT ALL ENDED
And then came the Kasaine complaint. I devoted an entire article to this last June. While Hagekhalil supporters, almost none of whom actually work for MWD, have desperately tried to marginalize Kasaine, multiple employees lent credence to her complaint, including MWD’s Black Employees Association, Hispanic Employees Association, and its AFSCME-affiliated union representing managers.
Inexplicably, Hagekhalil argued publicly that the Kasaine investigation had “exonerated” him. In fact, it had done no such thing. According to Kasaine’s attorney, Dawn T. Collins, the finding of disparate treatment substantiated Kasaine’s complaint that Hagekhalil subjected her to harassing, demeaning, and unfair treatment because of her gender.
And not surprisingly, even as Hagekhalil departs the scene, there are more complaints against him in the pipeline. For example, on January 14th the Legal and Claims subcommittee considered a complaint from Assistant General Counsel Heather Beatty, a matter that is described as leaving MWD with “significant exposure to litigation.” Beatty, who has been one of the agency’s top in-house lawyers since her hiring in 2008, alleges not only discrimination, harassment and retaliation, but also that Hagekhalil physically touched and restrained her during a Board meeting. The complaint letter is still posted and can be read (with some redactions) on the Board’s own website at www.mwdh2o.com.
So, it has been a hot mess. But now the agency prepares to finally move forward under the leadership of the well-regarded Upadhyay.
POST-SCRIPT
As I’ve often done during my two years covering MWD, I’ll let the words of some of those who reached out to me sum up how folks within the agency are feeling.
“Four years ago, the Board wanted to hire a useful idiot as its GM. Unfortunately, Adel didn’t even meet Minimums for useful idiot.”
“My manager and I said to each other, if this Board brings Adel back, we’re both retiring this spring. Thank goodness now we’ll be sticking around a little while longer.”
“It’s just been heart breaking to see what’s happened to Metropolitan, where I’ve worked almost since the time I got out of school. So many people, friends, who have retired over the past three years because they couldn’t bear to work here anymore. All that damage done; it’s going to take a long time to heal. But everyone in our group is looking forward to Deven’s leadership. Everyone is smiling again today.”
(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.)
