EDITORIAL GARFIELD FOR CITY COUNCIL DON'T JUST FIX POTHOLES, FIX CITY HALL.

IT'S been 35 years since anyone other than John Ferraro represented the 4th Los Angeles City Council District.

With Ferraro's death last spring, voters in the 4th District - which covers portions of the Valley in Studio City and North Hollywood as well as East Hollywood, Los Feliz and Silver Lake - will get a chance to choose a new voice in the City Council on Tuesday.

The two finalists in the big-spending race are Tom LaBonge and Beth Garfield. It's a choice between know-how and attitude, and on a council that desperately needs a new mind-set, attitude counts.

The Daily News endorses Garfield.

LaBonge, a longtime Ferraro aide before taking jobs with Mayor Richard Riordan and at the Department of Water and Power, is straightforward and likable. And he probably knows the 4th District better than anyone.

But LaBonge offers a brand of leadership that's passed its time. His claim to fame is that he can get any pothole fixed, any tree trimmed, any missing street sign replaced. Just give him a call.

Given L.A.'s lousy public services, that sounds promising. But with charter reform, it's no longer the job of council members to micromanage the bureaucracy, that's up to the department heads. And if the department heads don't do their job, it's up to the mayor to replace them.

The last thing L.A. needs is a return to the 15 fiefdoms abolished with charter reform. Nowadays, the answer to the failures of the L.A. bureaucracy isn't an insider who can occasionally pull its levers, it's leadership willing to tackle the city's systemic problems systemically.

LaBonge, a lifelong insider, seems to be too much a part of the system to even recognize what's wrong with it. He might be able to fix a pothole, but it's doubtful that he could ever fix City Hall.

Garfield, by comparison, brings a freshness and a reformist spirit to the campaign, even though her politics overall are, well, pretty liberal, too.

But she does have experience turning around failing institutions. As president of the Los Angeles Community College Board, she helped overhaul the system's budgeting process and decentralized authority to the college presidents instead of an inept central bureaucracy. The result is enrollment rose by 27 percent and voters' confidence was restored so that a badly needed bond issue for new buildings and renovations was approved.

Whether she can duplicate that success on the City Council remains to be seen, and it will require her to step on the toes of some of her friends in the labor unions. (LaBonge, by the way, also gets strong support from various unions, so both are indebted to special interests.)

But in the end it comes down to this: Garfield seems to understand the enormity of the challenges facing City Hall, and she seems unafraid to take them on. Of the two candidates, she's the one who appears more likely to buck the system than to play along with it.

At this moment in L.A. politics, Garfield is the better-suited candidate to take on that challenge.