40 YEARS BETWEEN CONVENTIONS IN L.A. IS TOO FEW CITY TAXPAYERS STUCK WITH CLEANUP AFTER MESSY, MEANINGLESS SHOW.

Byline: Matthew N. Klink Local View

OUR city's leaders rejoiced when the Democratic Party announced it had chosen Los Angeles as the site for its 2000 convention. In reality, how could Al Gore ignore the largest city in the state with 20 percent of the electoral votes needed to become president?

Since that fateful announcement, greeted with glee by city officials, the Democratic National Convention has been nothing but trouble.

Logistical and security problems became nightmarish ordeals, and fund- raising shortfalls plagued the convention from its inception.

In fact, in the weeks before the convention's start, the much-promised fund-raising effort came up short, and the Los Angeles City Council voted to kick in an extra $4 million of taxpayer aid to help the ``poverty- stricken'' Democratic Host Committee.

Not to worry, so our city's leaders promised, because millions of dollars from well-heeled convention delegates will flood the city's coffers, making up for our initial outlay of cash.

With the convention over, it's now questionable whether our city benefited at all from the Democrats' coming to town.

For normal Angelenos, the convention has been one gigantic hassle. In fact, things around the Staples Center are so bad it may take months for Los Angeles to recover, and the ``profitable'' convention could cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

Los Angeles residents were sold a bag of goods regarding the prestige of hosting a national convention, whose importance has diminished tenfold since the 1960s. Today's political conventions are nothing more than a series of staged events. Little is left to chance - so much so that no drama exists, which is why the television networks show as little of them as possible.

Equally important, political conventions are becoming increasingly meaningless to the political parties and downright irrelevant to the average American.

From a local perspective, the convention has turned out to be taxing, literally and figuratively, on our city's resources.

Traffic has been virtually impossible with downtown freeway closures.

Heaven forbid getting caught up in a presidential motorcade, an experience guaranteed to cause a 30-minute wait while officers with at least 25 police cars and an equal number of motorcycles ``control'' every intersection or freeway off-ramp for miles.

Staples Center, the crown jewel of our city's well-intentioned downtown revitalization effort, has been turned into a war zone, making it look more like Belfast, Northern Ireland, than downtown Los Angeles.

Beautiful street trees were ripped from the ground and shredded for fear they could be used as weapons by radicals. The area immediately south of downtown became a 24-hour military encampment, desolate of people except those who are supposed to be there or looking to cause trouble. The homeless, usually so numerous that the area's business regulars know them by first name, have all mysteriously vanished. Maybe this is Gore's new anti-poverty agenda - simply make the homeless disappear.

Surrounding Staples Center is a 10-foot-high chain-link fence with a heavy concrete base. The fence - the kind frequently seen at car races - curves out at the top and is referred to as ``the perimeter,'' as in military perimeter. It was added so the Los Angeles Police Department could control entrance and exit into the convention area, which in and of itself is a time-consuming experience.

Police officers were armed to the hilt. They wore black Kevlar helmets with ominous-looking face guards, had military-issue gas masks strapped to their legs and strutted about in full body armor. The police were ready to call in the enforcements, more paramilitaries, toting gas masks and ready to fire pepper spray and rubber bullets at radicals, again calling forth images of Northern Ireland.

Protesters, tens of thousands of them, were a sight to be seen. The American Civil Liberties Union fought diligently to protect this motley crew's First Amendment right to obstruct, interfere, distract and otherwise harass the numerous convention-goers.

Standing in line, waiting to get into the convention's first-night festivities, I witnessed firsthand a surreal environment of wealthy convention-goers and counterculture protesters, who, were it not for the convention, would have no platform to espouse their nonmainstream views.

Men in thousand-dollar suits, well-coiffed women in their nicest dresses and, in some instances, small children looking bored out of their minds but wearing the all-important Gore-Lieberman button, uncomfortably mixed and mingled.

It's ironic that for all of Clinton's and Gore's rhetoric about building a classless society, their very own convention was rife with a rigid class structure and a clearly disenchanted lower class.

Ringing the rapidly growing line of the wealthy and politically connected was an ever-growing number of protesters. Claims of unlawful police searches or other purported illegalities by ``the man'' abounded among the protesters. Opponents of abortion displayed gruesome photographs of half-aborted fetuses. Men with loudspeakers proclaimed the vision of Christ, as if he were a politician himself, while less than 10 feet away, another man shouted about the evil that is organized religion. It was controlled chaos, but small-d democracy ain't pretty.

I'm left with the undeniable conclusion that Los Angeles may have won the right to host the convention, but the city, its residents and thousands of convention-goers ultimately lost.

How many millions of dollars in police overtime will Los Angeles taxpayers have to shoulder? How many billions of dollars of lost work hours cannot be replaced? How much damage will the area south of downtown, just now recovering from the Lakers' basketball championship, have to endure?

City of Los Angeles residents were forced to endure worse traffic, destruction of public property and other nuisances, all because of the illusive prestige of hosting a convention.

Let New York, New Orleans or Chicago have future national political conventions. Los Angeles last hosted a convention in 1960. Forty years later, we held another one. Let's hope it'll be 40 years before some other genius decides to bring a national political convention back to Los Angeles.