A BETTER CITY? IT'S ALL ABOUT THOSE BAGS.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

I celebrated the time change last week with a sunset walk along the Los Angeles River after work with Atwater Village on the east and the scruffy green hills of Griffith Park to the west.

I'm embarrassed to say it was my first time recreating on the river, despite living so close to it for years. I've always heard ``L.A. River'' and thought of a concrete ditch, graffiti, piles of trash and our governor as a cyborg on a Harley racing a semi-truck through the Sherman Oaks section.

My vantage point blocked the view of 18-wheelers barreling down Interstate 5. And I could almost take the roar of traffic to be the sound of a rushing river.

Just yards away from one of the busiest stretches of freeway on the planet, ducks, geese and egrets frolic among the trees and bushes bursting up through the concrete. It would all be such an idyllic picture, I think, if it just weren't for all the discarded plastic bags hanging like funeral flags from the trees.

This is actually not a column about the river, believe it or not. This is about those damn plastic bags and other unsightly trash, and how they represent the frustrating truth about the city's leadership. While city officials do a lot of dreaming about making Los Angeles, circa 2025, a wonderful place, they can't quite get a handle on making Los Angeles, circa 2004, a habitable place.

City officials, it seems, have only big dreams, like visions of a Manhattan-like downtown, with homeless people and their tent cities a thing of the past, thanks to the housing trust fund. A high-speed levitation train whooshing commuters from the Pacific Ocean all the way to the Inland Empire. A high-tech airport with streamlined operations.

Everyone would earn a livable wage from kindly employers, and would be nice to each other. They wouldn't smoke on the beach or dump trash or scream racial slurs at one another.

And gangs? What gangs?

It's a nice vision, and I hope it comes true. But, meanwhile, can we just get the bags out of the river trees, please?

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton had the right idea with the ``broken windows'' theory that he espoused when he first came to Los Angeles in October 2002. That theory held that tackling the little problems, like cleaning up graffiti and fixing broken windows, creates a momentum that leads to the reduction of bigger crimes. There was something to it, since Bratton had used the strategy during his reign as top cop in New York City and crime dropped as much as a third. Based on that, I am proposing a new theory for the city to adopt. It's called the ``Bags out of the River'' theory. This theory holds that if the city starts putting the priority on little fixes around the city - from cleaning up the bags in the river to cutting the weeds growing three feet tall out of city street corners to emptying the overflowing trash cans on city streets and parks - it creates a momentum for the bigger things.

Despite the ribbing he received, Mayor James Hahn must have had the same thought last year when he announced the citywide crackdown on hanging shoes from utility and phone lines.

``It's a blight,'' Hahn said at the time, acknowledging that it wasn't the hugest problem the city faced. ``It's something people don't like to see. It sends a wrong signal about what's going on in that neighborhood.''

Unfortunately, I still see the same number of hanging shoes around town, so it seems this effort went the way of most of the reforms that elected officials announce with great TV news, inciting fanfare.

I want to emphasize that the bags theory is in no way a slight to the hard work of Councilman Ed Reyes and his Ad Hoc River Committee to revitalize the L.A. River, particularly as it runs through the industrial wastelands along Interstate 5. The First District councilman has become the No. 1 champion for the ill-treated river that has been traditionally ignored, kicked around and dumped on. He's also working on a long-term plan to make the river run clean once again, and turn its surface and banks into environmentally wholesome places to live, work and play.

I understand there are long-term plans to get the trash filtered out of the river. But would it be so hard for city crews to pick those plastic grocery bags out of the river trees now? I can imagine it would build some excitement and some momentum along the banks.

Los Angeles is a big city, and big cities need big visions and bold dreams as much as they need ongoing and immediate care. Sometimes the grandest gestures are the little ones.