CHICK MUST CHOOSE: MAYOR OR TAXPAYERS?

Byline: EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

IT'S no surprise that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa conned city taxpayers on the trash-collection fee hike. The trash-collection fee hike is simply the latest in the long and troubling line of City Hall spending hustles.

The surprise, though, is the deft tap dance that L.A. City Controller Laura Chick has performed to whitewash the hustle.

Chick started out with some promise. For more than one year, she pounded on the mayor to get him to tell her how much of the extra $137 million in trash fees that were supposedly to hire 1,000 more cops actually went to that purpose. Weeks and months passed with mute silence from the Mayor's Office.

An exasperated Chick publicly blurted out that it was like pulling teeth to get any hard numbers about police hires out of the mayor. And after much badgering and hectoring, she finally got the numbers she wanted.

The promised 1,000 new police had mysteriously shrunk to less than 400. The rest of the cash went to pay for raises, expenses and overhead. In other words, it went into the bottomless sinkhole of City Hall bureaucracy.

So what did Chick do when she finally got the word that the extra trash-fee millions did not go for the 1,000 new cops, and the even worse news that there was no assurance that it would any time soon?

Did she storm the City Hall barricades in righteous indignation and publicly upbraid the mayor for the obvious deception?

Did she apologize to taxpayers for that deception?

Did she demand that the mayor put whatever monies are still in the trash-collection fee kitty into the hiring of the officers?

No, she did her own version of the City Hall slow shuffle. She hid behind the typical arcane City Council language on the measures it adopts and simply said that the wording in the trash-fee measure never actually guaranteed that the extra tax money would be spent exclusively to hire more officers.

This was a huge stretch on a technicality. But what was worse, Chick then did a complete back-flip and indignantly said that taxpayers shouldn't have assumed that all of the funds were going to hire the additional cops. This smacked of blame-the-victim.

But Chick, Villaraigosa and anybody who is even one step beyond comatose knows full well that the trash-collection fee hike would never have gotten out of the gate if voters had the slightest inkling that politicians were asking them to dig deep in their pockets to feed an already outrageously bloated city bureaucracy. As it now stands, Los Angeles residents pay the highest fees for trash collection in the state, and for what?

Chick, however, assures us that the extra cops will eventually be hired by mid-2010. If she has that on the good word of Villaraigosa, heaven help her and city taxpayers.

Chick is a close ally of the mayor on most things that happen around City Hall and as such, she picks and chooses her words carefully when it comes to the mayor's fiscal doings. That's good for Villaraigosa. But Chick is also supposed to be the taxpayers' watchdog on city spending, and that means she's duty-bound to hold the mayor and City Council accountable for that spending, especially spending that's clearly not in the best interests of the city.

Chick is going to have to make up her mind. Which is more important, protecting the mayor or protecting the taxpayers? She can't do both.