EDITORIAL USE IT OR LOSE IT VILLARAIGOSA HAS THE POWER AND THE MANDATE TO PUT THE COUNCIL IN ITS PLACE.

MAYOR Antonio Villaraigosa, having established himself as a conciliatory and compromising politician, has carefully dodged making any pronouncements on the crass power grab of the Los Angeles City Council.

Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe his own self-esteem is so high that he believes the 15 council members will kowtow to him when it really counts. Or maybe he's part of the scheming that led to the council members' plan to extend their own term limits by four years -- but not the terms of the mayor, city attorney or controller. Maybe he's the one who initiated it.

It's hard for those not invited to the backroom meetings where the real decisions are made in Los Angeles to know for sure.

What is clear is that the mayor -- the man who was elected precisely because he seemed to have the brass to stand up to City Hall shenanigans -- hasn't stood up for anything.

He won't say how he really feels about the term-limit scheme, which, by the way, will ensure that his ally Jack Weiss gets his chance to run for city attorney and get rid of the bureaucracy's nemesis, Controller Laura Chick.

He hasn't done much to defend his prized Police Chief William Bratton. Bratton has been targeted by ex-cops Bernard Parks and Dennis Zine, who served during the decades that the LAPD's reputation became so soiled a reformer from outside had to be brought in to clean it up. Bratton's sin was to say what everyone knows to be true: The council members don't know what they're talking about. After all, this and previous councils ducked all responsibility for what went wrong in the LAPD.

Even Villaraigosa's school-reform efforts have come under attack from the council. On Tuesday -- the same day council members adopted the term-limit ballot plan cloaked in a phony ethics-reform package -- they also passed a measure asking voters to raise the salaries of school board members and impose term limits on them. This was done without the school board showing even the slightest inclination to adopt reforms, thereby undermining Villaraigosa's efforts to fix L.A.'s failing schools.

City Council members are just doing what they have always done -- abusing their power to serve themselves and preserve the bureaucracy that coddles them.

Charter reform was supposed to end this by stripping the council of all but its legislative duties while empowering the mayor to run the government. The Hahn administration had no taste for power, so little changed then, and now it's Villaraigosa's turn to decide whether he's a weak mayor or a strong mayor.

If he's man enough to claim he can run the schools, he ought to be man enough to put the council in its place when he has the full authority of the new City Charter.

It's time for Villaraigosa to smack back. Real mayors don't dance with do-nothing city councils; they take charge and put them to work on the people's business. Villaraigosa has an electoral and charter mandate to lead this city and make city government work for the people. He will either use this power or lose it.