EDITORIAL THE UNION'S MAYOR HAHN UNDERMINES MTA AND SIDES WITH STRIKERS.

HAVING alienated the people from the Valley and the Southside who elected him, Mayor James Hahn has found new allies to build his re-election campaign around.

He is shaking down everybody who does business with the city in hope of amassing a war chest so large he can scare off any serious competition long before the campaign begins late next year.

And now he's taken out a union card and sold out any pretense of representing the interests of the people of Los Angles.

When MTA workers went out on strike three weeks ago for the 10th time in 40 years, Hahn stood with union leaders and called for a quick settlement.

By that he meant the Metropolitan Transportation Authority should give the strikers anything they want - as it has done so often in the past to buy labor peace at any price. That appeasement policy is the main reason Los Angeles has the worst public transit system of any big city in America - and probably in the world, for that matter.

Hahn, of course, is a member of the MTA board. But like his appointees, Councilmen Antonio Villaraigosa and Martin Ludlow, he had been barred from direct participation in the negotiations because he took money from the unions.

So in the face of an united front for the remaining nine MTA board members, Hahn has done his best to undermine the transit agency and its last, best and final offer.

On the eve of the striking mechanics finally voting on the MTA offer, the mayor chose to give an interview in which he made it clear they still had friends in high places looking after them.

Hahn took up the union's cry for arbitration and, given the nearly $100 million gap between the strikers and the MTA, that is certain to cost a lot of money the transit agency doesn't have these days. Arbitrators have a habit of looking at the two sides' positions and splitting the difference, to one degree or another.

That's why the MTA doesn't want someone who isn't responsible for running the buses and trains deciding the issue.

The mayor, of course, isn't one to take an unequivocal position and stand up in public and state what he really believes is the right thing to do and why.

So he double-talked about how the arbitration should work and never came out and said the MTA should give away the farm.

Meanwhile, his fellow recused board members, Villaraigosa and Ludlow, found a friendly L.A. judge - as if there were any other kind when it comes to the City Hall power structure - to lift the ban on officials who took money from the strikers negotiating a contract with them.

So much for the law. So much for common decency. So much for the public interest. So much for the transit system.

This is going to mean worse service and higher fares for the half million transit-dependent people whose lives have been made miserable by the strike - and higher taxes for everybody so transit workers can retire with full pensions in their 40s with free health benefits for life.

We're all being taken for a ride.