EDITORIAL SOUND OF SILENCE.

FOR all the haste with which city leaders have worked to expand term limits and impose a trash tax, they take their good old time when it comes to doing the people's business.

Reducing the noise at Van Nuys Airport, for instance, has moved ... much ... more ... slowly.

The airport's neighbors have been putting up with the noise nuisance for two decades, while city leaders have dawdled, stalled and avoided responsibility.

According to Wayne Williams of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, the Los Angeles Airport Commission first looked into phasing out loud Stage 2 jets during the early days of the Bush administration -- the George H.W. Bush administration, that is -- in 1990.

Only now has the panel agreed -- contingent, of course, on additional study and bureaucratic hurdles -- to finally phase out the jets. If all goes according to plan, that should happen in ... seven years.

So under the best-case scenario, it will have taken a mere quarter of a century to fix the Van Nuys Airport problem. No wonder city leaders want to keep extending their terms -- they want to stick around long enough to take credit for doing something right that should have been done years ago.