EDITORIAL A LONG WAY TO GO $2 MILLION MORE FOR LOCAL PROJECTS WILL BARELY MAKE A DENT IN CITY HALL'S DEBT TO L.A. NEIGHBORHOODS.

BEHOLD the great generosity of Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn!

In his unceasing munificence, the mayor has bestowed an additional $2 million of the city's federal funds on local projects, bringing up the grand total to $7.8 million.

At long last, city services will be adequately and fairly distributed in every neighborhood!

Well, maybe not.

We suppose we shouldn't get too flippant - $2 million more of federal funds for local projects is an improvement. But it's a small improvement on a big problem: City's Hall's catering to special interests and its own bureaucracy at the expense of L.A.'s neighborhoods.

The $7.8 million for local projects is still just a drop in a large bucket, the $116 million slated to go from our wallets to City Hall - by way of the federal government through block grants - in fiscal year 2003-04.

In total, that $7.8 million amounts to less than 7 percent of the city's federal funds.

And while city leaders have gone to great pains to explain that local project money is being more equitably distributed than once believed, the San Fernando Valley is still getting less than its fair share.

Nearly three weeks ago, Hahn outraged Valley leaders with a budget plan that would have put only $5.8 million of federal grant money into local projects, and then only $520,000 - or 9 percent - of that into projects in the Valley.

Shortly thereafter, the Valley's representatives on the City Council besieged the mayor with protests, and Hahn's bean-counters agreed to find more money for Valley projects. They also made the case that when one takes into consideration the Valley's share of citywide projects, the Valley's take of federal funds rises to about 21 percent.

That's a lot better than 9 percent, but it's still too low.

The Valley has a third of the city's population. It's also believed to have a quarter of the city's poor, although that figure is expected to rise substantially when poverty figures from the 2000 Census become available.

At the very least, the Valley should be getting a quarter of federal funding for local projects.

And federal funding is just the beginning.

The Valley has long been short-changed when it comes to basic city services. When the Local Agency Formation Commission calculated how much alimony the Valley would have had to pay City Hall had secession passed, it came up with a figure of $127 million - the amount the Valley overpays in taxes each year that it never gets back in services.

Throughout his campaign against secession, Hahn repeatedly vowed that the days of inadequate and inequitable city services were over. If the city held together, he said, City Hall would at long last begin to live up to its responsibility to L.A.'s neighborhoods.

But since then, Hahn has backed off his promise to boost city services. And despite now throwing $2 million more in federal funds at local projects, the old discrepancies and inadequacies persist.

At best, the additional $2 million can be seen as a down payment on City Hall's obligations to L.A. neighborhoods, but the outstanding balance is long overdue.