EDITORIAL STOP THE GIVEAWAYS OUTRAGE: 8.

TO Los Angeles residents facing higher taxes and fewer services, it must come as a shock the city has cut a deal with its architects and engineers on a new contract that allows these public employees to make out like bandits.

Recession or not, these are good times to be in ``public service.''

The new three-year contract includes pay raises worth 2 percent of the employees' salaries for every six-month period going back to 2001 - twice the rate of inflation.

In total, the contract represents a 13 percent hike that will cost taxpayers $86.3 million out of a cash-strapped city treasury - not bad at a time when pink slips have replaced pay raises in the private sector.

But that's typical for city workers, the only people in all of Los Angeles seemingly immune to the recession, the tight city budget and impending cuts from Sacramento.

Among city employees, pay raises averaging 4 percent a year are the norm, while the rest of us face higher taxes, steep cuts in public services and pay raises below the 2 percent inflation rate.

Collectively, L.A. municipal workers are the highest paid in the nation, even though the city services are among the nation's worst. They draw salaries that, on average, easily beat the pay for comparable private-sector work, and that's not even including their fat benefit packages and fantastic pensions equal to 75 percent or more of their highest salaries.

Because so few people vote, the unions help nearly every city official get elected, which gives them awesome power at City Hall. Their payoff is that huge pay raises continue unabated, regardless of the economy or anything else.

And those elected officials who are so beholden to the unions have the gall to plead poverty at every turn while looking for new ways to gouge the public.

Last month, the City Council determined the city was too poor to hire an additional 320 new police officers at a cost of $69 million.

Fair enough. The decision ticked off Mayor James Hahn, but, given the uncertainty of the times, it seemed prudent.

But if the city can't swing $69 million for new cops, then surely it can't afford $86 million for engineers and architects in the form of largely retroactive pay raises, can it?

The City Council has delayed ratifying the deal for a few weeks, ostensibly to see what happens in Sacramento in terms of local funding.

Yet whatever the outcome of the state budget mess, the council's decision should be the same.

City wages should be frozen immediately.

No union ought to receive pay hikes - least of all retroactive ones - at a time when city leaders are talking about scaling back library hours and hiking garbage fees by 66 percent. Of course public employees deserve fair treatment, but in tough times that also means they must share in the pain.

How the council ultimately acts on the proposed pay raise for architects and engineers will be a good indicator of its priorities. Are the council's members more interested in serving the public, or in serving the unions that get them elected?

Soon, you will find out whether your public servants have any intention of serving you - or care only for themselves and the special interests.