EDITORIAL HOT AIR HAHN'S OUTRAGE OVER DWP IS TILTING AT NONEXISTENT WINDMILLS.

BACK in 2003, Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn triumphantly announced - to the cheers of environmentalists - that the Department of Water and Power would open a massive wind farm 12 miles north of the High Desert community of Mojave.

The new green power facility was supposed to be operating by July 2004. Now that 2005 is well under way, we learn that the wind farm isn't likely to be in business until at least 2006.

That's to say that, in two years, we have come no closer to getting our wind farm. Hahn's boasting turned out to be well, a lot of hot air - a false promise to environmentalists, matching the false promises he's made to just about everyone else.

And this false promise didn't come cheap.

The press conference, which featured Hahn standing in front of a turbine at the DWP's downtown headquarters, was carefully choreographed by P.R. giant Fleishman-Hillard. Cost to the taxpayers of Los Angeles: $62,526.

And for what? Why, exactly, would the DWP - a municipal monopoly - need to publicize a new electric facility in the first place?

Answer: To make Hahn look good.

The more we learn about the DWP's $24 million contract with Fleishman- Hillard, the more boosting Hahn's public image seems to have been its main purpose.

February 2003 was a bad time for Hahn, the DWP and its P.R. campaigns. An audit by City Controller Laura Chick found the department had spent about $120 million promoting its Green Power project, without actually doing much to deliver clean, renewable energy.

So Hahn and his spin doctors at Fleishman-Hillard, joined by various other city officials, staged their phony dog-and-pony show. The public was going to get something for its investment in green power, and credit belonged to the mayor who made it all happen.

Now, irony of ironies, we learn that an event crafted to counter the perception that the city's Green Power program was only hype turned out to be ... only hype.

When responding to the widespread perception that his administration is corrupt, particularly in its dealings with Fleishman-Hillard, Hahn invariably says he's outraged that the firm ``overcharged'' the city for its services. But what he ignores is that the over-charging is only a symptom of a bigger problem, namely that the public paid dearly

for a shady deal that benefited the mayor greatly while doing little for the public.

For all his carrying on, Hahn's feigned outrage over the Fleishman- Hillard scandal is really just, well, more hot air.