EDITORIAL BUILT-IN LOOPHOLE A FLAW IN LAW-AND-ORDER TAX-HIKE PLAN RAISES QUESTIONS.

ONLY days after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed to put a half-percent sales-tax hike on the November ballot, it became clear that the supervisors made a mistake in not guaranteeing the District Attorney's Office, the Probation Department and the Public Defender's Office a share of the money.

District Attorney Steve Cooley was ``promised'' that his office would get $19 million from the $500 million to be raised by the measure, and the others would also get enough money to do their jobs. But a major loophole was built into the measure that makes the promise to the D.A.'s, Probation and Public Defender's offices not worth anything.

Unlike the Sheriff's Department, the Los Angeles Police Department and other local police agencies, they are not guaranteed a fixed percentage of tax proceeds, and they aren't protected from having their money taken back any time the supervisors feel like it.

Cooley has good reason to be concerned that the supervisors would take with one hand what they had given with the other. This isn't some paranoid fear. It's happened before.

Back in 1993, California voters approved Proposition 172, a statewide, half-percent increase in the sales tax, also ostensibly for public safety. But with 172 ensuring a certain minimum in funding, Sacramento has happily siphoned off local property tax revenues for its own purposes, leaving communities no safer, just more highly taxed.

It happens all the time.

According to Steve Ipsen, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, ``Whenever the D.A. is able to get grants from the state and federal government to enhance special prosecutions, we see a corresponding decrease in our budgets (of revenue from local taxes).''

So Cooley has good reason for his doubts about the latest tax hike. So should all L.A. County taxpayers.

In drafting the language of the proposal, Sheriff Lee Baca and the supervisors were careful to make sure that the tax hike wouldn't result in general fund cuts for police agencies. They included ``maintenance of effort'' provisions to protect the Sheriff's Department and local police departments.

But they refused to do so to hire prosecutors, public defenders and probation officers - all of whom will be needed if thousands of more cops are on the street busting criminals.

That means that the only guarantee voters have that the supervisors won't use the new tax hike as a subsidy for their own waste is their word. And, as Cooley points out, that isn't much of a guarantee.

Voters are fed up with the lack of police officers, the revolving-door jails and the hoodlums who control vast reaches of the city and county in the absence of effective law enforcement. They are also fed up with government officials who try to hoodwink them.

For reasons that only the supervisors could understand, they have made the difficult task of selling this tax increase that much harder.