EDITORIAL : SIX-FIGURE PUBLIC SERVANTS; LOCAL GOVERNMENTS PAY $100,000 SALARIES TO A MULTITUDE.

THE cost of local government keeps climbing higher and higher.

For a week now, the Daily News has been printing a running list of Los Angeles city and county government employees with $100,000-a-year salaries or more.

The roster includes 1,701 names - a shock for voters and taxpayers who aren't familiar with how local government works and how much it spends.

Spending by the city of Los Angeles, for example, soared from $1 billion in 1977 to $4 billion this year.

During that time, the city work force grew by 12 percent to nearly 33,000 despite Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax-limitation measure which was intended partly to slow the growth of the size and cost of government.

After Proposition 13, Los Angeles - like many other local governments - cut public services and programs, while L.A. also increased wages, benefits and pensions for city employees. To help pay for it all, the city imposed or increased a variety of taxes, permits, fees and licenses.

Thus, the public paid more and more for less and less. The trend continues, as Los Angeles falls further behind in such basic responsibilities as routine maintenance of streets and sewer systems. A decade ago, the city's Engineering Bureau estimated that deferred maintenance of the 6,500 miles of streets would cost $1 billion. Today, the estimate of backlogged work is $3 billion.

The plain truth is that the city has cut service employees in many key areas for the last 20 years while adding administrators, clerks, management analysts and other bureaucrats.

``It's a wonder anything gets done. Inefficiency has been built into our system,'' former Los Angeles city government chief Bill McCarley said earlier this year in connection with a Daily News special report, ``Living beyond our means: A city at risk.''

That exhaustive report also showed that the city generally pays more than private-sector employers pay workers for comparable responsibilities and work demands.

Clerks in City Hall earn an average $33,418, compared with clerks in private-sector jobs who average $25,000 to $30,000, according to the 1996 California Benchmark Compensation and Benefit Trends Survey by William M. Mercer Inc., a firm that does California wage and benefit studies.

We aren't saying that everyone on the list of six-figure public employees is overpaid. But with government costs rising at every turn, the public must ask how many of those $100,000-a-year salaries are worth the expense.