EDITORIAL SWEET DEFEAT ALL OF L.A. STANDS TO GAIN FROM JUDGE'S RULING ON DOWNTOWN REDEVELOPMENT.

IN a key legal decision delivered last week, the city of Los Angeles lost, and the people of Los Angeles triumphed.

In his ruling, Judge Marvin M. Lager declared that City Hall's plan for all of downtown seceding from the L.A. tax base plainly violates the law.

The city should not waste any more time or money on this outrageous attempt to rob the neighborhoods of services and stick them with the bill to line the pockets of downtown development interests and land speculators.

For the past three decades, city officials, suffering from a pathetic case of New York-envy, have tried desperately to make downtown a West Coast Manhattan.

The vision was untenable from the beginning.

L.A. is too large and too sprawling to operate on the spokes-on-the-wheel model. It is not a booming hub from which surrounding communities feed, but is - and should be - a collection of neighborhoods and business centers, all interconnected but each self-sufficient.

But the impracticality of the idea never kept city leaders from trying.

To the shameful detriment of the city's outlying communities, city leaders have pumped a steady stream of taxpayer subsidies into downtown for nearly 30 years, erecting temples to themselves while the neighborhoods crumbled.

Meanwhile, downtown developers grew ever richer, rewarding city politicians with highly addictive campaign contributions.

Key to their shared plan for a monumental downtown was the aggressive use of the Community Redevelopment Agency. By converting all of downtown into a redevelopment zone, city leaders planned to invest all tax revenues generated within the area into further redevelopment.

So for 35 years, while downtown L.A. expanded, and with it its need for city services, the area wouldn't pay a dime toward funding those services. The rest of the city would pick up the tab of an ever-increasing, decades-long subsidy.

It was always a horrible idea, and now it's a dead idea.

Judge Lager concluded that when city leaders voted to expand the downtown redevelopment zone by 879 acres and $1.7 billion, they violated the court ruling won years ago by then-San Fernando Valley Councilman Ernani Bernardi to cap available redevelopment revenues at $750 million.

The news couldn't be better for all of Los Angeles.

With their redevelopment scheme shot down, Mayor James Hahn and other city leaders now must go back to the drawing board. Now they can draw up the comprehensive plan that L.A. has for too long lacked, one that preserves single-family neighborhoods, densifies along busy transportation corridors and creates numerous job centers throughout the city.

The days of pie-in-the-sky visions are over. Now is the time for creating an L.A. that works for all its residents, not just its most connected developers.

After 30 years of subsidies, downtown has a vitality that ought to be self-sustaining. After 30 years of neglect, L.A.'s neighborhoods need some help.

City Hall must put its leadership and the public's tax money into a comprehensive plan for the future of the entire city. The days of lip service to neighborhoods are over.

Downtown's loss is the city's gain.