EDITORIAL : BATTLE OF THE BINGE; CITY'S ONLY CONCERN IS LOOKING OUT FOR ITSELF.

L.A.'S voracious, money-hungry appetite has led to a bloated government, out-of-control spending and massive waste of taxpayer dollars.

But don't take our word for it.

Take it from an insider with firsthand knowledge of L.A.'s profligate ways.

After working three years trying to save residents a few measly dollars and make the city better, real estate czar Daniel A. Rosenfeld is leaving his city job in disgust - just as City Hall wants to go on a $1.5 billion building spree that will mean higher taxes for everyone for a generation.

What Rosenfeld found was ``incredible overconsumption'' by self-serving bureaucrats and elected officials who run city government for their own benefit, not the taxpaying public.

The proposed bond issues for police, fire and library buildings represent a largely ``unnecessary'' spending binge at taxpayer expense, said a disgusted Rosenfeld in a parting shot before leaving city government for the private sector.

In Rosenfeld's view, Mayor Richard Riordan, the City Council and the bureaucracy all are guilty. This isn't sour grapes but the insight of an expert recruited by Riordan in the vain hope that the City Hall beast could be controlled.

Here are a few ways Rosenfeld found the beast eating our money:

$100 million is spent on building operations, four times what's needed.

200 city leases could be consolidated to 14.

28 downtown city office buildings could be consolidated into five.

Ever wonder why redoing City Hall went from $97 million to nearly $300 million? One reason is that the project has 13 inspectors on it while four inspectors are all that would be needed at a private project at its peak, he said.

Inside L.A.'s fat and sassy city government, no one seems to care - not the mayor, not the council, and certainly not the bureaucracy that controls everything and almost everyone.

It works for them. Does anyone else matter?

Rosenfeld blamed the mayor and his staff as much as others, especially for not doing more to change cumbersome civil service rules that allow the bureaucracy to inflate costs.

``It's the procurement method. It adds 30 percent to the cost in overhead,'' he said.

A government that serves itself serves no one.

When the city's sole purpose is to build buildings for the comfort of officials, to overpay for underachievement, to salt in benefits unheard of in the private sector, it's no wonder there's never any money to provide better services to the public or to restore economic health to our neighborhoods.

If real reform of this dysfunctional City Hall is ever achieved, Dan Rosenfeld is the kind of leader who needs to be brought back into a system of government that is trying to make life better for the people of the city, instead of the people who work for the city.

The city of Los Angeles doesn't need the nonsense of the kind of ``bill of rights'' being proposed by the elected Charter Reform Commission.

What it needs is a simple edict that states that any city employee or elected official who wastes, squanders, steals or rips off the public's money is out on his or her ear.

Maybe the charter commission could write that into the new and improved City Charter. Maybe then we wouldn't need the other 700 pages of gobbledygook. Maybe then the people we pay to serve us would do just that.