HENPECKED! L.A. OFFICIALS PLAY CHICKEN WITH THE COURTS.

Byline: JANE ROBISON

INSTEAD of electing a new mayor come June, the voters of Los Angeles perhaps would be better served if they appointed a Grand Master of Consent Decrees.

Whether it's cleaning up the LAPD or the city's sewage spills into Santa Monica Bay - nothing, it seems, gets done in city government without first securing a court order.

A point that hasn't gone unnoticed by one candidate for mayor, state Controller Kathleen Connell.

``We're becoming a city run by federal consent decrees,'' said Connell in a recent interview with Daily News editors. ``We're the only city I know of that operates like a ward of the federal courts.''

I don't feel like a ward of the state as much as one of the Tweedy farm hens in ``Chicken Run.'' It seems like all our elected leaders have ``gone on 'oliday.''

Consent decrees are basically out-of-court settlements between consenting government agencies, and in Los Angeles they seem to have been around before carbon-dating. The Los Angeles Fire Department has been under a consent decree since 1974 requiring recruits to live within the city of Los Angeles.

Twelve years later, Los Angeles was hauled back into court and ordered to stop flushing its raw sewage into the Santa Monica Bay, which seems like a common sense kind of thing to me. But apparently, the city couldn't come up with $3.4 billion to upgrade its entire sewage-treatment system until it was staring down a judge's gavel.

Once federal judges started throwing their law decrees around and realized how much fun it was to clean up Dodge City, there was no stopping them.

The '90s turned out to be the ``Decree Decade.''

In 1993, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department ended a long- running class-action suit alleging sexual harassment and discrimination in hiring practices when it signed a consent decree and spent at least $2.5 million to improve working conditions and advancement opportunities for women.

In 1996, the rush to judgment reached a crescendo in the courts.

First, the Los Angeles Unified School District signed the Chanda Smith Consent Decree following a class-action suit filed by a parent whose daughter twice flunked 10th grade after she was denied enrollment in a special education program. Cost to the district: from $1 million in 1995-96 when it was first implemented to $69 million in the 1999-2000 budget.

Next, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was forced to stop transporting its passengers in rickety, overcrowded, broken-down buses. By 2004, the agency has projected, it will have spent more than $730 million to comply with the consent decree, including the cost of buying and running new buses, legal fees and the special master's salary.

In December 1996, the City Council and the American Civil Liberties Union signed a consent decree to hire and promote more women and minorities over the next 18 years after 95 officers claimed discrimination and sexual harassment in the LAPD. Cost the city: an estimated $35 million.

The decree spree that year even spilled over into neighboring Burbank, when an EPA consent decree established a groundwater treatment plant ostensibly to clean up dirty water at Lockheed Martin's old facility.

So the latest consent decree between the U.S. Justice Department and the city of Los Angeles to run the LAPD at an estimated cost to the public of $40 million for the first year and between $30 million and $50 million annually after that is really old hat.

It's been noted before that consent decrees often allow local officials to evade the democratic process and democratic controls. Instead of accepting responsibility, they can claim, the judge made me do it.

But what happens if a judge makes a mistake or oversteps his or her bounds?

What happens if voters no longer matter because nine justices decide they get to pick the next president of the United States, or the next mayor of Los Angeles or the next do-nothing City Council?

I know it's far-fetched.

But I wonder what would have happened if the City Council and the city attorney just said, No, we don't need no stinkin' law decrees to clean up the LAPD.

Would the court have ordered the LAPD to cease and desist? Would 9,000 police officers be out of a job?

If someone broke into my home, would I be calling 911 or Jacoby and Meyers to come sue the thieves?

Voting for mayor now seems irrelevant. But when a federal judge appoints a new Master of the Universe, I would like to be consulted. I think that's only fair when I and 3.5 million of my Los Angeles neighbors keep getting the master's bills.

Come to think about it, I'm not sure the Valley needs to secede to get its fair share of city services. I think we'd get a better deal if we just sued under the equal protection clause of the Constitution and signed a consent decree with City Hall.

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2 photos

Photo: (1 -- 2 -- color) ``Chicken Run''

Photos courtesy of DreamWorks

Photo Illustration by Reuben J. Stern/Staff Artist