EDITORIAL THE CITY HALL GANG PROPOSED TAX HIKE IS AN INSULT TO L.A. VOTERS.

LAST week, most Los Angeles City Council members appeared to look the other way when Janice Hahn proposed a $50 million property tax hike to fight gangs. Now, a week later, the council has backed the measure unanimously.

What happened to change all those minds so radically?

For one thing, everybody else in town is suddenly coming up with proposals to deal with gangs, and the do-nothing council could hardly be left out. And then, of course, members undoubtedly did some polling and found that if they spent enough money lying to voters about their plan, it might just pass.

Thus the newfound enthusiasm for a regressive $72 tax per year per parcel to raise money the council doesn't need.

Gangs are the issue of the moment, thanks to civil-rights attorney Connie Rice's stinging report showing that the city has wasted billions on piecemeal, ineffective efforts to curtail the crisis. And so the council has reacted in the only way it knows: Reaching into the pockets of taxpayers.

But there are some problems with this all-too-predictable need for cash.

For starters, it would behoove the council to come up with a comprehensive anti-gang strategy before asking the public to fund it. As it is, the council's approach seems to be: Give up the money, and we promise we'll figure out what to do with it later.

That's the way it's worked in the past, and the money gets squandered.

L.A.'s gang crisis is very real, and people are desperate to do something about it. But that ``something'' has to be more than the usual fluff that politicians think is a substitute for action. And it has to be more than a case of city leaders seizing on the crisis du jour as an excuse for another money grab.

We generally know what the outline of a comprehensive anti-gang strategy would look like. It would be a systemic effort to overhaul the gang culture; to provide opportunities, jobs, hope, stability and quality education where they are lacking.

But we need a lot more than a broad outline, we need a plan for making that outline a reality. And we need the council to make an honest effort to better spend the $7 billion budget it already has before going to the public for more money.

City revenues have swelled in recent years due to the real-estate boom. The council has raised an additional $75 million by raising garbage fees to hire cops -- money that remains unspent. The council also has its own ridiculous $170,000 a year salaries and bloated staffs to pare down. And city government has for decades rubber-stamped expensive public-employee pay raises and frivolous lawsuit settlements.

Before the City Hall gang has the nerve to exploit public fears about gangs for more money, it ought to have the decency to rationalize its own spending.

Maybe the council should take a poll to see what the public thinks of that idea -- better government, not just more expensive government. We suspect the public would like that even more than a new tax.