EDITORIAL FRAGMENT OF A FIG LEAF CITY COUNCIL'S ETHICS REFORM FOOLS NO ONE.

LOS Angeles City Hall can hardly defend its record for problem-solving, but the City Council's stab at campaign finance reform marks a new low.

Never has it taken so long to achieve so little.

In August 2001, the city Ethics Commission came up with 60 proposals to clean up rampant City Hall corruption. The package was buried in a council committee for nearly 18 months before a pathetically watered-down version was sent to the full council Tuesday.

Predictably, the council has given its seal of approval to the eviscerated legislation, audaciously passing it off as campaign-finance reform.

After the council's unanimous vote, Councilwoman Wendy Greuel echoed the sentiments of her colleagues by boasting, ``We are saying to the public that lobbyists do not have greater access than our constituents or anyone else.''

We don't know whether Greuel is so naive that she actually believes lobbyists - like contractors, lawyers, union leaders and many other special interests - don't have access that's denied ordinary people.

But it's a big lie and this measure won't do anything to change it.

The council approved a single reform: A rule calling for council members to recuse themselves if a lobbyist involved with an issue has contributed $7,000 to any political committees the official controls, bundles $10,000 in contributions for an official or serves as a paid consultant for their campaign.

But from all reports, the $7,000 threshold is so high that it might as well not exist at all.

And even if a lobbyist cracks the limit, a purchased politician wouldn't necessarily have to recuse himself or herself from voting on the lobbyist's pet issue. Under the proposed law, the politician can simply decline to discuss the matter at hand with the lobbyist - a provision that would be impossible to enforce.

If that weren't bad enough, the law applies only to the 180 registered lobbyists in the city of Los Angeles - a small fraction of the much larger pool of City Hall influence-peddlers.

The cap would have done nothing to block the city's recent decision to award more than $50 million in airport and public works contracts to the Tutor-Saliba Corp., which has thrown a fortune into city political campaigns - including $100,000 into the mayor's anti-secession campaign - to avoid being disqualified from public contracts because of its questionable business practices.

This toothless ``reform'' can most charitably be described as a baby step in the right direction - an acknowledgment of just how serious the need for real reform is.

By their words and actions on ethics reform, the City Council's members show they know that the public is opening its eyes to the nakedness of their corruption. They desperately want to cover that corruption up without actually changing the way they do business.

To conceal their nakedness they've created something less than a fig leaf - a fragment of a fig leaf, one too small to hide anything.

If they think they're fooling anyone, they're wrong.