DON'T BUG THE PUBLIC SERVANTS.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

I wrote last week about the outrageous lengths to which the Los Angeles Unified School District board goes to keep the public from wasting its valuable time by yakking at meetings.

However, I didn't mean to imply that the seven LAUSD board members are alone in their disdain for the public. Not by a long shot.

While it's brazenly spiteful to limit speakers to only seven per agenda item (at three minutes each, that's 21 minutes tops for public input on important issues such as people losing their homes for new schools), the five Los Angeles County Supervisors have evidently decided they don't need public input at all.

In September, the supes went into a closed session meetings twice to talk about something mysteriously billed as ``anticipated litigation,'' but was actually about the recommendation to shut down the trauma unit at the troubled Martin Luther King-Drew Medical Center.

I supposed they assumed there might be some legal trouble with the decision to close the trauma care unit in the South Los Angeles-area hospital. They were right - and, ironically, it was their decision to meet in closed session that started the legal trouble in the first place.

Here's why: Just hours after the second meeting, the supes held a press conference announcing their support for closing the trauma unit.

For those of you not familiar with California's open-meeting laws, that appears to be a direct violation. I say ``appears'' because the supervisors now claim that they all came to the decision to support the closure independently - you know, when they were somewhere else doing something completely unrelated to meeting in closed session.

(Hint to politicians: If you are going to violate laws and don't want to get caught, don't tell people about it. Certainly don't call a press conference. Reporters may seem dumb sometimes, but they eventually figure things out.)

To make it all seem kosher, the supes held the officially required public hearings, allowing a lot more than seven people to testify, and sometimes berate the board. But all the while, it seemed they had their minds made up.

As of Tuesday, District Attorney Steve Cooley is now officially looking into the allegations. But considering all that has come out of his ``looking into'' things of late, I don't expect the supes to get in much trouble.

Neither do they, clearly.

What the supervisors - and LAUSD board members and every other elected official in this land - know is this: There are no real repercussions for ignoring, disrespecting or excluding the public, whom they seem to think of as the enemy. It's only a small percentage of constituents who ever feel the need to contact their elected officials. And those who do so without the aid of a high-powered, well-known lobbyist often come away with tales of frustration and ire.

The disrespect for the public is as rampant as the desire to keep the unruly at a distance. In more than two years of observing City Council meetings, I never once saw one start on the appointed time of 10 a.m.

Members of the public who trekked downtown during a workday morning and stood in the long security lines ended up waiting no fewer than 30 minutes while their highly paid representatives moseyed on down from their fourth-floor offices, stopping to chat in the back halls.

It doesn't get better the further you go up the government chain.

Nick Kurek, a reader in Granada Hills, wrote to tell me his frustrations with attempts to contact his congressman, Brad Sherman, complaining about what he saw as abuses of the facilities at the Veterans Administration hospital in West Los Angeles. In response, Sherman sent him a brochure about how he supports veterans.

Been to the White House lately? Of course you haven't. For security reasons, the streets around the president's manse are permanently barricaded from the throngs of the great, annoying masses.