EDITORIAL FAIR REPRESENTATION DISTORTED COUNCIL DISTRICTS DENY CITIZENS A VOICE IN GOVERNMENT.

THE newly impaneled citizens commission to draw up new boundaries for Los Angeles City Council districts can help make city government more responsive to the public by making respect for communities of interest its No. 1 value - and the interests of politicians its lowest.

For decades, City Hall has gerrymandered council districts to ensure the petty politicians can keep their jobs and continue to serve the interests of the narrow elite that wields power downtown.

Council districts that have no integrity are a key piece in perpetuating a system that for so long has failed to serve the people of Los Angeles.

Van Nuys, for instance, is carved up into five council districts so nobody really represents the interests of this community.

The San Fernando Valley with well over a third of the city's population is split among seven council members, only four of them residents of the Valley. The effect is that more than 250,000 Valley residents are disenfranchised, unable to elect someone from their own community with values that reflect their own.

By population, the Valley is entitled to five of the 15 council seats plus a significant portion of a sixth.

At best, the over-the-hill council members pay lip service to the Valley but do little to assure that the Valley gets its fair share of city services and that the interests of its residents and businesses are looked after.

At worst, as in the case of Brentwood Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, they have utterly no qualms about putting a garbage dump in the back yards of Valley residents.

The redistricting commission, while only advisory, has until March to come up with a plan that respects neighborhood boundaries and larger communities of interest as a whole like the Valley.

One of the best features of the new City Charter was to mandate creation of redistricting commissions for the City Council and the Los Angeles Unified School District board. Like the council districts, school board districts were deliberately gerrymandered to deny fair representation to the Valley, which has only one district wholly within its boundaries.

Both commissions have a duty to make it as hard as possible for our small-minded, elected officials to deny fair representation to any segment of the community based on race, ethnicity - or geography.