EDITORIAL : POLITICAL FIRE SALE: IF VALLEY RESIDENTS WANT ANYTHING FROM THEIR LAWMAKERS, THEY BETTER PUT THEIR MONEY WHERE THEIR MOUTHS ARE.

VALLEY voters should have learned a valuable lesson from the recent session of the state Legislature.

If they want the people they elected from their communities to vote in their interest, they should do what everybody else does who gets them to work in their interest: set up a political action committee, so they can buy their support.

The unions did it, and look at what they got. Guaranteed protection of jobs, salaries and benefits for bus drivers, nothing for the transit-dependent people of the nine-city Valley region.

The Indian tribes did it, and Democrats all the way up to Gov. Gray Davis jumped through hoops to double the number of slot machines in the state.

So why doesn't the Valley do it?

Sadly, politics has been a schizophrenic game.

There's the public story used by politicians to sell their constituents on how much they care about their needs and how they're going to make their lives better by getting them cheaper and faster bus services, for instance.

Then there's the private story, where money does most of the talking. And that's what happened when Valley Democrats agreed to privately protect the unions and publicly agreed to a one-for-all, all-for-one strategy of pretending a Valley bus zone without any cost savings is good for you.

The special interests won. Now the bill is loaded with protections for the unions and no benefits for the public.

So let's be creative. A Valley PAC devoted to buying votes in the interest of the people of the Valley would get the attention of lawmakers.

In their battle to be the Assembly's next speaker, Tony Cardenas and Bob Hertzberg would only have to go around the corner to pick up oodles of money to impress their colleagues instead of tracking down Indian tribes or other special interests far removed from the Valley.

Valley PAC money could help Sen. Richard Alarcon remember how as a city councilman he actually walked the Valley transit zone application from City Hall to MTA headquarters to get it going. The memory and the money might have kept him from voting to strip all financial incentives from creating the zone.

And Sen. Tom Hayden, once so passionate about breaking up the MTA, might have been reluctant to support a bill that would create a miniature version of the transit agency in the Valley.

Why have so many politicians forsaken the constituents to curry favor with special interests? The answer, or course, is that money talks and not enough voters walk into the polling booth to matter.

So maybe it's time we stopped worrying about getting out the vote and started getting out the cash. Don't worry about lobbying the governor to veto this bad transit bill, just send a check.

All aboard the Valley money train.