EDITORIAL : THE COLLAPSE OF L.A. LABOR GETS A FAST PAYBACK; TAXPAYERS GET ZILCH.

IN the future when people explain the collapse of Los Angeles, they will pick Tuesday - June 3, 1997 - as a perfect illustration of what was wrong in the once-great city.

In the municipal election on that day, the big fish - the politically powerful - ate the little fish, the tax-paying public.

Municipal employee unions provided political support and delivered the votes on election day to make sure that the elected city Charter Reform Commission would have a solid majority of commissioners acceptable to labor.

The outcome of Tuesday's runoffs carried the city even farther down the path that was set in the April primary, when labor-supported candidates won seven seats outright on the charter commission and City Council incumbents easily won re-election with active support from city employee unions.

So, when did labor get its payoff? On Tuesday, just before the polls closed - too late for the taxpayers to react at the ballot box.

Late on that afternoon, the council met in a closed-door session after disguising its intentions by issuing an indecipherable agenda to the public.

Once the council was behind closed doors, it voted unanimously to give an incredible 16 percent pay raise - 4 percent a year - to almost 20,000 municipal employees, represented by seven different unions.

In exchange for the higher pay, the city will only get a pledge from the unions to try to hold down workers' compensation costs that have soared out of control. But the workers will get the higher pay, even if the workers' comp experiment fails.

The agreement is a policy-making blunder of gargantuan proportions by a council that acts as if it's either completely clueless or totally careless.

It's guaranteed to rankle the taxpayers. Indeed, the council hardly could have done more to alienate the taxpayers if it had started with that goal in mind.

A 16 percent pay raise is more than most L.A. residents employed in private business have seen in the past four years or can realistically expect to see during the next four years. Does the council really expect those taxpayers to approve such rich payments to public employees?

Rubbing salt into the wound, Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg acknowledged that 16 percent is more than most private employees and most other government employees can expect in the next four years unless the economy improves dramatically. Nevertheless, the council consented to give it, without waiting for the economic recovery, and even though the city is wrestling with a huge deficit.

That's right - the city can't balance its budget, but the council lacks the courage to forgo big raises for municipal employees.

Who's really running the city?

The answer is simple and visible: It's a conspiracy of public employee unions, entrenched politicians who are primarily interested in holding on to their power and finally the special interests - all of whom live off of the taxpayer.

But why should council members care? It's not their money they're handing out, it's the taxpayers' money. It's coming out of your pocket, not theirs.

Who deserves the blame for this? The voters.

Tuesday was election day, and a record low turnout of voters - barely 10 percent - bothered to participate.

The public is at fault for failing to vote, whether that was due to apathy or disgust with the system or any other reason.

And if the public didn't care enough to go out and cast a respectable number of ballots, then the system doesn't see any reason to pay attention to the concerns of nonvoters.

Serious damage is being done to Los Angeles. The city is slapping the hard-working taxpayers who work in private-industry jobs, and saddling itself with a worse reputation as a free-spending, high-tax city run by a council that can't set prudent, sensible policies.

The public certainly has not forgotten - although perhaps the council has forgotten - that city employees' pay and benefits have skyrocketed during the past two decades while public services have been reduced sharply.

In the past 20 years, City Hall has hired many more paper-pushers in its central bureaucracy, paying them more than they would earn in private industry. The public is paying more than it should for what it gets, and the city is delivering fewer services. Meanwhile, the city's infrastructure is crumbling while backlogged repairs are multiplying.

So why on Earth should the people of L.A. tolerate these new, massive pay raises for employees in a system that produces less and less?

And why on Earth shouldn't residents move to - or try to break away and create - smaller, better-run cities where public services are superior and where voters have greater confidence that their local government is accountable, efficient and businesslike?

That's not ``white flight.'' It's taxpayer flight.

The tax-paying public and tax-paying businesses have been fleeing this city for years and the trend won't stop as long as L.A. is encumbered with taxes and a local government that is dedicated to self-service - not public service.

On Tuesday, the big fish ate the little tax-paying fish. But, one day the tax-paying minnows will be nearly extinct in Los Angeles, and all the big fish - the high-paid municipal employees and free-spending public officials - will find nothing in the food chain to eat.

That's when the whole cycle will come to an end. The system will come crashing down, and people will try to explain the collapse of Los Angeles.

It's still not too late to avoid the destruction of the city. It will require either more people voting, or an incredible change of heart by public officials.