EDITORIAL : PRICEY PUBLIC SERVANTS; L.A. PAYS TOP DOLLAR FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES.

THIS is Day 4 of the long list the Daily News is printing in installments showing the 1,701 Los Angeles public employees and officials with $100,000-a-year salaries or more.

The salaries are public information. We are printing the data to shed light on the darkness of how local government works and how much it spends.

The six-figure public employees are numerous and, although some may be worth it, a Daily News survey shows that other large cities and counties typically pay far less than Los Angeles for their top officials.

In addition, other large local governments in the United States increasingly are going to a pay-for-performance plan for their top executives. That's not the case in L.A.

Neither performance, benchmark studies nor nationwide salary standards are used often in Los Angeles to set six-figure and higher salaries for local bureaucrats.

Without such yardsticks, how are decision makers and the public supposed to know if the fat cats are worth their pay?

Public employees often have a great deal: good pay, very little chance of losing their jobs even for incompetence, and rock-solid retirement benefits.

Taxpayers who get smaller paychecks for private-sector jobs without such security, and who underwrite local government, will wonder why they're paying so much to provide a better deal for others than they get. Good question.