EDITORIAL A FAIR DEAL? TAXPAYERS FACE A STIFF BILL FOR A GENERATION OF LAUSD FAILURE.

LOS Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Roy Romer asks a lot of San Fernando Valley taxpayers with his $3.3 billion school construction bond.

But he's begged the question so far on whether it's a fair deal.

Valley residents will wind up paying a third of the costs in the form of higher rents and property taxes. But they'll only get a fraction of the benefits: 19 percent of the new campuses and 13 percent of the new classrooms.

Even by LAUSD standards, that looks like a bad deal.

Not according to Romer.

Building newer and better schools throughout the rest of the LAUSD is good for the Valley, he says, because it will cut down on the district's need to bus in some from over the hill, and it will cut down on the practice of year-round schooling.

But busing and the year-round calendar are LAUSD creations, instituted by the board and the district's bureaucracy as part of their assault on neighborhoods schools and quality education.

So is overcrowding. The only high school LAUSD built in the two decades before Proposition BB was the Belmont Learning Center, the unfinished fiasco best known as the nation's costliest school.

Asking voters to pay billions to undo the district's selnflicted policies is a tough sell, especially without a corresponding commitment that the quality of education will actually improve as a result.

While there may be a compelling reason why San Fernando Valley voters should back the LAUSD's latest bond measure, neither Romer nor fellow LAUSD officials have offered it yet.

With LAUSD enrollment on the rise, the need for school construction is clear enough. But need alone doesn't justify the LAUSD's latest bond. The LAUSD has a long, notorious history of identifying needs and asking for more taxpayer money as a means of filling them, only to waste the money through a combination of inefficiency and corruption.

Taxpayers are still paying for Proposition BB, the 1997 $2.4 billion school construction and repair bond. Five years later, Proposition BB has only delivered on half of its promised projects while running $600 million short.

That won't happen again, district officials insist, because this time they have enacted various bureaucratic safeguards against waste and abuse.

But LAUSD officials made the same assurances prior to the passage of Proposition BB, and there haven't been enough real changes at the district to suggest that this time the assurances carry any more weight. In fact, the district bureaucracy has become more costly and more bloated.

Combined with the outstanding costs of Prop. BB, the latest Valley school bond would have the effect of raising annual property taxes for the owner of a median-priced Valley home by $320 a year with yet another bond issue to come in just two years. In a city and a state with some of the highest taxes in the nation, that's a serious additional burden.

But if it comes with ironclad guarantees of fiscal responsibility, equitable spending, power sharing and better education, most Valley voters would probably be willing to take it on. For that to happen, though, the district needs to show that it's changed its ways for good.

A commitment from Romer and his team to fulfill the yearnings of the public for a school system that brings pride to the community and educates its children in the basic skills needed for a richer and happier life is the least we should expect.