Councilman Alarcon's Residency Determined by a Toilet Flush?

City Councilman Richard Alarcon and his wife, Flora, have been indicted on charges they did not live at the Panorama City home whose address allowed the councilman to represent District 7. Now, grand jury testimony from a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employee suggests that if the Alarcons in fact lived there, they were doing so in the dark without doing much washing up, according to the LA Times.

Between September 2007 and September 2009, water usage for the home "averaged out to 8.2 gallons per day," which "would be enough for either two toilet flushes in a 24-hour period or a single shower of a minute and a half."

Similarly, the use of electricity also could indicate that the home was largely unused; for the same two-year period "the Panorama City house used an average of 1.8 kilowatts of electricity per day," which "would not have been enough to power a single 100-watt light bulb over a 24-hour period."

In response, one of the Alarcons' attorneys, Fred Woocher "said the information on the utility bills does nothing to show that the councilman ran afoul of the law." The Alarcon team continues to assert the charges are unfounded, with Woocher calling the investigation into the councilman and his wife's residency a "stupid waste of time and money."