EDITORIAL FAREWELL, MAYOR RIORDAN A GOOD START FOR A NEW L.A.

RICHARD Riordan leaves Los Angeles a better city than how he found it when he was elected mayor eight years ago.

Parks and libraries are being rebuilt, trees trimmed, streets and even a few sidewalks are being repaved. Downtown - after billions of dollars of public investment - is showing small signs of vitality.

And the bureaucratic hacks who ran city departments inefficiently (with the connivance of the mediocrities who called themselves City Council members) have been replaced and made accountable to the mayor.

These are signs of progress, ones that Riordan talks about in glowing terms that are intended to obscure the failures, the unfinished business and the missed opportunities.

And there are many.

The Police Department - the cornerstone of Riordan's electoral promise - is at war with itself and under siege from political interests who have little respect for its fundamental purpose of maintaining law and order.

Little or nothing has been done to regenerate the city's neighborhoods, and the promise of community empowerment through City Charter reform is being scuttled by bureaucratic ineptitude and political obstructionism.

Coherent planning of new development, housing or transportation policies has failed to materialize.

Even school reform, which Riordan claims as his greatest achievement, has produced few results and seems to amount to little more than throwing vast sums of money around without creating accountability.

Not all the credit - nor all the blame - lies with Riordan.

Does anyone doubt he would have been elected - if the law allowed - to a third term as mayor against either Jim Hahn or Antonio Villaraigosa?

The ordinary people of the city believed in his good intentions and trusted him to do what he could to make the quality of their lives better. They owe him a debt for his good service.

But the accomplishments could have been greater if he had trusted them more.

At critical junctures - labor negotiations with powerful city unions, efforts to privatize inefficient services, creation of a borough form of government, purging influence peddlers and back-room dealings from City Hall - Riordan blinked.

But the unintended consequence of the Riordan years is that the seeds of genuine grass-roots democracy in Los Angeles have been sown.

Movements for political self-determination have sprouted in half the city; community-based groups are flourishing and organizing to fight for their interests; immigrant populations are turning out to vote in record numbers.

Perhaps history will see the Riordan years as the turning point when the people took control of their city and the politicians were forced to serve the public instead of themselves.

That would be a fitting legacy.