EDITORIAL ETHICAL LAPSE CITY COMMISSION TURNS A BLIND EYE TO EIDC SCANDAL.

BEING an ethics commissioner in the city of Los Angeles can't be easy.

There are so many scandals, so little inclination to do anything about them

Still, some scandals beg for action, such as evidence that the mayor and members of the City Council have been operating a slush fund financed with public money.

But three weeks after District Attorney Steve Cooley announced his investigation into the abuse of funds at the quasi-public Entertainment Industry Development Corp., the city Ethics Commission hasn't so much as uttered a peep.

Once again, the commission seems to have its collective head stuck in the sand, choosing to remain silent on the very sort of abuses that cry out for condemnation by what purports to be the city's ethical watchdog.

Maybe that's because the Ethics Commission's members are appointed by the very people they're supposed to oversee. Hand-picked by the council and the mayor, they know who calls the shots.

And they know that the EIDC implicates all of City Hall, and touches directly on Mayor James Hahn's pet obsession, San Fernando Valley secession.

Of the hundreds of thousands of public dollars the EIDC has wasted (including $500,000 for President Cody Cluff's lavish expense fund and tens of thousands for local political campaigns), $25,000 found its way to Hahn's anti-secession war chest.

The mayor admits he solicited the money but says he had nothing to do with approval of the contribution - even though he heads the EIDC's executive committee. In other words, Hahn is the boss of the EIDC but has nothing to do with what it does.

For the Ethics Commission, pursuing that lead would require taking a frank look at L.A.'s real political scandal, the one that permeates all of city government: the downtown power structure's widespread use of public funds for its own selnterest.

Some sacred cows in City Hall are simply not to be touched. And ``filmgate'' touches them all.

But almost daily, information surfaces that the EIDC was failing miserably at the task for which the city and county created it: facilitating film permits and stopping runaway film production.

Not only was the EIDC contributing money to other cities competing with Los Angeles for film production, but it was also doing a terrible job of handling film shoots in the area, according to entertainment industry officials.

Between excessive fees, double-billing and failure to refund deposits, they say, the corporation has actually driven productions away.

The numbers seem to bear the critics out. Local production days increased from 22,069 in 1995 to 33,371 in 1997 - EIDC's first two years - but then fell back to 27,435 in 2001.

Somewhere along the line, the EIDC appears to have forgotten about its mission, turning instead into little more than a piggy bank for its staff and an easy source of campaign cash for its politicians.

An ``ethics commission'' that doesn't consider this kind of scandal worth getting out in front on is one unworthy of the name.