EDITORIAL MONOPOLY ON POWER POLITICIANS PROPERTY GAMES COST US ALL DEARLY.

FROM the look of things, the high rollers in Los Angeles City Hall think they're playing one big game of Monopoly - and downtown is that highly coveted, dark-blue stretch of property that contains Park Place and Boardwalk.

The trouble is that it's not a game and it isn't play money. It's taxpayers' money, yet taxpayers don't even have a seat at the table. So they end up with precious little for all they contribute to City Hall's fun.

In contrast, special interests, especially downtown developers and landlords, are rolling in dough.

City Hall's latest giveaway plan is to buy two more downtown buildings for $125 million - that's $33 million, or a third more than the city would have had to pay a year ago.

City leaders say they need these buildings, inflated price and all, to house yet more bureaucrats - the highest-paid and least-efficient municipal workers in the country. It's clear now why the public pays taxes. It's to provide facilities suitable to such governmental royalty.

That's why our city leaders raided the public treasury for $300 million a few years ago to refurbish City Hall as a Palace to Failed Government, a gilt-edged pleasure dome if ever there was one. That was money that could have been used for more police to protect us from hoodlums, to fix streets and sidewalks, to put garbage dumps far away where they belong, or meet the hundreds of other needs of the people.

The crimes against the citizenry don't end there. City leaders now have agreed to buy the former Transamerica Building for $35 million and spend up to $150 million more to fix it up. Then there's several hundred million dollars more coming out of the general fund for a new police headquarters.

And all this money is to house city officials, bureaucrats and workers in the best facilities money can buy.

Yes, building the downtown of our city leaders' dreams takes big money. But it costs next to nothing to keep the public quiescent.

Case in point: Last week, the council voted to spend a whopping $400,000 on efforts to mitigate traffic congestion along the 101 Freeway.

That's right, $400,000 - or less than the tiniest fraction of 1 percent of what City Hall intends to spend on itself - to ``fix'' a freeway that's jammed from dawn to dusk, seven days a week.

But what do you expect? It costs big bucks for good office space for city bureaucrats, and after funding their lucrative pensions and lavish salaries and benefits, there's just not a whole lot of money left for the little people who pay the bills.

What's ironic about all this is that by concentrating the bulk of the city work force downtown, City Hall only exacerbates L.A.'s traffic woes and makes it harder to deliver services to the neighborhoods. So city taxpayers lose out every which way as a result of city leaders' lopsided priorities.

But in City Hall, it's far more important that bureaucrats have healthy work spaces than residents have a healthy city.

Hey, it's their game of Monopoly, and there's no free parking for the city residents who are the losers time after time.