EDITORIAL ONE MORE MESS ADD ANOTHER BUNGLED BUILDING TO THE LAUSD'S COLLECTION.

AS far as the Los Angeles Unified School District's building blunders go, the district's latest ranks in the small-potatoes category.

After all, squandering $1.2 million in rent on an unoccupied building for the district police force is nothing compared with, say, building a $175 million school without environmental safeguards on top of a leaky old oil field or going $600 million over budget on Proposition BB projects.

But it's a reminder, as if we needed one, that the LAUSD still doesn't have its act together as it embarks on a massive school-building program.

This is the same district that plans to ask the public for billions of dollars in higher taxes in a November bond initiative.

The latest horror follows a familiar story line: District bureaucrats come up with a seemingly flawless plan, which the school board promptly rubber-stamps. Then, once the deal is inked and the money spigot is opened, all kinds of unforeseen problems present themselves.

Here's LAUSD senior facilities manager Nadir Farnoush's description of the snafu du jour: ``I don't think the time it would take to do all the work was calculated.''

Oops.

It turns out that the district officials, who signed the lease for new LAUSD police headquarters some 20 months ago, hadn't realized that the building had a leaky roof and other problems. Then, when they finally did, they couldn't figure out who was responsible for the repairs - the district or the landlord - since the terms of the lease were so badly written.

Yet nearly two years ago, when the lease was signed, board reports suggested that the contract was clearly written to designate who was responsible for what repairs.

But the report seems to have had it wrong. The ensuing squabble, coupled with $2 million in other renovations and some managerial problems, took almost two years - at the price of more than $65,000 a month in rent - to clear up.

Now the district police are supposed to move in on May 4, but cross your fingers, just in case.

Even once the cops finally get their new building, more work will probably still be needed. The LAUSD may have to do additional renovations to house some of its civilian administrators, because there's not enough room for them in the district's new $184.2 million headquarters.

Yes, that's the same new $184.2 million headquarters that, last summer, LAUSD officials claimed was far larger than the district's administrative needs.

Somehow, those needs continue to grow.

Yet even though the bureaucracy consistently gets larger, its long list of bungled projects suggests that it's not getting any better.

The district has got a long way to go to prove that it should be trusted with even one more cent, let alone billions of dollars.