EDITORIAL DYNAMIC DUDS BUNGLED BUSWAY WATER PROJECT UNDERMINES TRUST IN GOVERNMENT.

THANKS to good bureaucrats at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city's Department of Water and Power, the people of Los Angeles now have a perfect illustration of how inept government can be.

Because the highly paid officials of the two agencies don't know which way is up, the chance to build a pipeline for recycled water for irrigation at the same time the busway was being constructed was missed. Instead, the two projects will be carried out separately, wasting millions of dollars and disrupting the San Fernando Valley twice instead of once.

It is a classic bureaucratic fiasco.

The whole long story about the DWP's quixotic quest to do something with its used toilet water has become an epic farce to the people of the Valley. After striking out on plans to build a plant to recycle gray water from the Sepulveda Basin treatment plan and send it back to our taps, DWP got the idea of using the water to irrigate the landscaping along the MTA's planned east-west busway, at Pierce College and elsewhere.

Not a bad idea, since it would save money both by only tearing up the streets one time and by providing water for irrigation at half the cost of potable water. All that and it would save a significant amount of our region's most precious resource: water. All the two agencies would have to do is coordinate their construction projects. Simple, and revolutionary!

Alas, theories are great; it's only when they get turned into actualities that the problems begin.

DWP glommed onto the Rapidway project about one year too late, and the MTA never thought about how it might save some money on water that could be used for better services or lower fares.

When the left hand finally figured out what the right hand was doing, it was too late. Still, a million dollars more was spent to confirm the obvious: The timeline for completion of the $330 million public transportation project would have to be shelved while engineers and contractors developed plans for building the pipeline at the same time as the busway.

Clearly, after three decades of seeing promises of a subway across the Valley become a light rail become a monorail become only a busway, the MTA was in no position to delay completion of the line beyond next year.

So the busway will go forward as planned and then the DWP will rip everything up again and build the pipeline. The public will get twice the headaches from closed and torn-up streets, twice the traffic tie-ups - and a bigger bill.

So, thanks again go to DWP and MTA for bungling another opportunity.