EDITORIAL WAKE-UP CALL CITY HALL'S TAX, FEE AND RATE HIKES CONCEAL OFFICIALS' FAILURES.

WAKE up Los Angeles, before it's too late.

At the rate City Hall is going, the cost of living in Los Angeles will soon be so high that only the rich and the hoodlums living off the drug trade will be able to afford to pay their bills, especially those for water, sewer and other services provided by the city.

Now, the nation's costliest and least productive city government wants a 40 percent rate hike on your sewer bill. That's become ``necessary'' because Mayor James Hahn, the City Council and a host of public works bureaucrats abandoned maintenance of sewer lines just as they had previously stopped repairing the sidewalks and streets, overseeing the police or fulfilling many of their other duties.

Maintaining the city just never fit into their plans.

After all, they had to reward the public employee unions, consultants and contractors for getting them into their posts as the nation's highest- paid municipal officials. So they just scrimped on taking care of the city. The result over the years has been literally thousands of sewage spills running down the city's broken streets into the city's broken wastewater runoff system into the ocean, which not surprisingly is now poisonously polluted.

Now after all these years of ignoring the pleas and threats of federal officials and environmentalists, city officials have decided to stop fighting to continue their policy of destroying the quality of life and jeopardizing the future of the city.

The trouble is all $5.3 billion they already rake in is committed to themselves and their friends. There isn't enough left over to what they broke so they keep on jacking up fees and rates and looking for new ways to blackmail the public into paying higher taxes.

``Your money or your life'' - that ought to be the city's motto.

For time and again, residents are put in the position of being told the streets won't be safe, the sewers will overflow, the water will be dangerous to the health.

City officials want 40 percent more for sewer service on top of the 33 percent or more that's coming in water rate hikes and the hundreds of other fee increases that have been or soon will be imposed. And don't forget to count up your share of the $500 million tax increase on the November ballot to fix the long broken water runoff system or the half-cent increase in the sales tax to give the cops a fighting chance against gangsters.

So wake up to what's going on. You the taxpayer, you the citizen and you the ordinary person are being ripped off to line the pockets of fat cats. Don't fall for it anymore. Make them show you the economies they're making. Make them pay some of the bills. Make them serve you.