EDITORIAL DESPERATE MEASURES L.A. OFFICIALS ALWAYS WANT TO TAX THE PUBLIC - NOT MAKE ECONOMIES.

FOLKS in City Hall seem to be getting desperate - desperate, that is, to avoid the inevitable. The onus is on them to tighten their own belts to find the money to hire the new cops that everyone agrees the city needs.

With the failure of the Measure A sales-tax increase last week, Mayor James Hahn started campaigning for an only-in-L.A. tax hike almost immediately. In case that doesn't go over, other City Hall stalwarts are proposing a 600 percent increase in the trash-services fee to pay for more cops - a charge that would solely punish people who live in houses and small apartment buildings.

That alone ought to be proof that the nation's highest-paid municipal officials have completely lost touch with reality - and their constituents.

Just about the only adequate service the city's residents get is refuse collection, which they have long received as part of their entitlement except for a modest surcharge for trash cans and other equipment. Now the City Council's Public Safety Committee has raised the specter of charging homeowners up to $500 a year for what they've been getting virtually free.

And the worst part is that it wouldn't do anything to stop the city from dumping its trash in Sunshine Canyon in residential Granada Hills.

City officials had no qualms about jacking up trash fees to produce an extra $29 million just a year and a half ago, but they seem unable or unwilling to discuss openly what it would cost to have an environmentally sane trash policy.

An idea this audacious could only come from a city government whose officials didn't blink twice when they increased water rates 11 percent (with an additional 20 percent hike coming soon) so they could loot the Department of Water and Power of an extra $60 million to pay off the special interests that keep them in wealth and privilege.

Like the trash fee hike, the water rate hike didn't buy anything visible for the public benefit. It just disappeared into the black hole that is the city's general fund, presumably ending up in the pockets of city workers, consultants and contractors.

City officials need to stop talking taxes and trash and to come to terms with what they've been denying: They must find significant economies in their $5.3 billion budget before they hold up the public again.