FREE PARKING DOESN'T HELP WHO IT SHOULD.

Byline: Joseph Honig Local View

ONCE again the men and women who lead Los Angeles are showing well-intentioned contempt for working and struggling families who have everything going for them but six-figure incomes.

These are the families without pools or Prada clothes or restaurant tabs equal to some mortgage payments.

These are the families who drive buses, keep the peace, answer our phones and maybe work second and third jobs to stay out of debt.

And these are also the families who teach their children to be good and caring citizens by recycling and protecting the world outside their doors as if it were a second home. (This, despite the fact that energy-saving and environmentally-friendly devices such as solar heating systems and state-of-the-art appliances may be far beyond their financial reach.)

So now our city leaders come up with one of the most mean-spirited, misguided and downright regressive initiatives the middle class has ever had to swallow.

Our political pashas have intoned that they will allow electric-vehicle drivers to escape any and all tickets at L.A. parking meters.

A new law dictates that officers will not write those $40 bills to battery-powered motorists, those fortunate few who - besides presumably owning other gas-imbibing cars for long-distance trips - have upward of $35,000 to spend on everybody's well-being.

What this means is that you may be as good to the environment as you are to your mother. You may refrain from any and all activities that pollute our tropical plain. You may even long for one of those electric conveyances, but choose to stay solvent in this rather uncertain time.

But linger too long at a doctor's office or parent-teacher conference, and you'll be hit with a fine that some wealthier citizen now blithely avoids.

We have thus reached a point in our cityhood where the comfortable are rewarded for good deeds only they can afford to practice. And it's not as if L.A. had the charity or compassion to offer millions of other residents - those for whom new electric cars will forever be too pricey or impractical - anything resembling democratic solace.

Dreaming of tax breaks for separating biodegradables from 1,000-year Styrofoam? Forget it. Want utility bill relief for safe disposal of motor oils? Get serious.

Even members of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and other tree-huggers in good standing may be picking up the traffic-fine slack for more solvent fellow-travelers. The money's gotta come from somewhere. And those aging, beaten-down gas hogs - you know, the kind driven mostly by poor people to low-paying jobs - will be more appealing targets than ever.

If the truth be told, I suppose none of us is particularly surprised by this callous turn of events. The rich always seem to win. Soon - if President Bush gets his way - billions of dollars will go missing from the federal treasury when the most prosperous 2 percent of Americans toast the end of estate taxes.

In Los Angeles, where the working poor and middle class make life glorious for the expense-account crowd, our gardeners, laborers, clerks and maids are now expected - by virtue of their need for private transport - to tip the boss.