EDITORIAL NO TRASH FREE PASS BUSINESSES OUGHT TO PAY FOR CLEANING UP THEIR DUMPED GARBAGE.

IN Los Angeles, it is a crime to dump trash on the sidewalk.

But apparently the practice of trash-dumping has been ignored for years in the city's blighted core. Both city officials and those with the Central City Association admitted this week that the practice of businesses using the city's sidewalks as private dumps has been going on for years. The businesses must have figured that if the city didn't care about the human refuse dumped on Skid Row, it couldn't care much about the bags of garbage they left on the streets of the toy district or the fashion district.

And for many years, they were right.

City officials never cared about cleaning up downtown until the past few years, when the real-estate boom pushed into downtown, and a few influential developers started showing an interest. Suddenly all the insiders started wringing their hands over the homeless problem on Skid Row.

While it's high time that civic leaders paid attention to this long-standing crisis, the newfound zeal after years of neglect is hard to swallow.

What's worse is that rather than cracking down on the offenders and forcing them to clean up, the City Council is preparing to launch a $250,000 program to clean up trash -- at the taxpayers' expense.

Let's not forget that this is the same council that chose to levy a fee on city residents for emptying their sorted curbside trash bins. Apparently ordinary people have to pay for getting rid of their trash legally, while the well-connected get to do it illegally for free.

Cleaning up Skid Row is a good thing for the entire city. But the businesses that break the law -- indeed, have been doing so for years with impunity -- can't be given a free pass. If the city is going to front the funds for a cleanup, it ought to aggressively recoup the money from those lawbreaking businesses on the back end.

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