City, county all wet in Watergate.

Byline: Sandy Sand, Local View

LOS Angeles now has its own Watergate: Bottled Watergate.

The city and county of Los Angeles may be drowning in a sea of red ink, but both are fighting for air over bottled water-related scandals.

The city was the first to get into hot water when City Controller Laura Chick released an audit of city expenditures in 2006, showing that city departments spent $89,000 on bottled water for their employees.

Within days, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued a memo telling department heads their employees must buy their own bottled water, a policy embraced by previous mayors.

Apparently city department heads are LAUSD grads, because they can neither read nor follow instructions.

In the three years since the mayor told department heads to put a cap on it, city water expenditures more than doubled.

A follow-up audit released by Chick on March 17, revealed that 13 city departments spent more than $189,000 last year buying bottled water.

Making the biggest splash of alibis and excuses for his department's bottled water purchases was Police Chief William Bratton, saying his officers are out in the cars all day and sometime get caught up for hours in the field.

That's all well and good except for one thing - those same officers pay for their own uniforms, shoes, motorcycle boots and bullets. They can pop for their own water, too. The taxpayers should pay for all or nothing.

Not to be outdone by the city, the county took a ride over the waterfall by going one better - and far more ridiculous.

The county supes pay a college student $9.92 an hour to, among other things, peel the labels off water bottles, print out new ones on a computer emblazoned with the county seal and slap them on.

The customized bottles are waiting for the five supervisors as they take on the official business of the nation's most populous county.

If that isn't a colossal waste of taxpayer money and the student worker's time, there isn't one.

For the most part, county supervisors aren't talking.

An aide to Zev Yaroslavsky said flat out, "Zev doesn't want to talk about it."

The only one who would go on record was a spokesman for Mike Antonovich, who has to win the Nonsequitur of the Year Award for his reply: "My boss prefers green tea."

Officials are suffering from a convenient memory gap, not being able to recall exactly when the county labels first appeared. But they do remember the reason why: To avoid giving bottled water companies free advertising during the public-access television broadcasts of the supervisors' meetings.

They obviously have forgotten about those clear, cylindrical liquid holders that that would accomplish the same goal: water glasses.

These guys behave so childishly by spending our money like kids in a candy store with a $100 bill they found on the sidewalk.

Since they don't behave like adults and can't be trusted with breakable drinking glasses, we should get them a supply of plastic sippy cups emblazoned with arrows pointing them to the nearest water fountain.