IT'S ABOUT SAVING L.A. FROM FURTHER DEGENERATION.

Byline: Ron Kaye

YOU can't help but respect Bill Lockyer - he didn't become a lawyer until after he became a legislator.

Maybe that explains why he's generally regarded as smarter and more honorable than most of his colleagues. Maybe being a lawyer-legislator explains why he doesn't say a word about the central issue behind the Boland bill: stripping the Los Angeles City Council of the power to veto a vote of the people of the Valley to secede.

That's what Lockyer, D-Hayward, and his Democratic colleagues don't get: this is not a fight about breaking up the city of Los Angeles. It's a fight about saving the city of Los Angeles before it falls into such ruin that nobody wants to live here.

It is not about secession. It is about restoring the right of political self-determination to the people of the Valley.

There is nothing confusing about that. If Bill Lockyer, who wields considerable clout as president pro tem of the state Senate, is confused, it is because of his own attempts to cloud the issue of basic political rights by suddenly raising questions about the whole process of how cities are formed.

He wants to create a commission picked by the Legislature and the governor to look at this process of forming cities and specifically at the economics of the Valley becoming a city in its own right - a kangaroo court if ever there was one.

Lockyer has spent nearly a quarter of a century in the Legislature and already was in his third term in the Assembly in 1977 when the issue of robbing the people of California of the democratic right to secede from their city and form a new one came up.

The record shows he voted for it then, and again in 1985 when it was amended. And he didn't lift a finger to right this wrong in the 19 years that have elapsed since. Only now does he want to study the question for a year or two - now when the Valley is demanding its rights back.

The law he helped put on the books allowed a city council to negate a secession vote of its own people. This veto power, in effect, reduces the voters to colonial status at the mercy of a legislative body that can ignore the will of the people.

Now the target of this astonishingly undemocratic action was not all the people of California. Only those who lived in the San Fernando Valley.

Then, as now, many people in the Valley were angry about the way their city government treated them.

They were, and are, angry because they believe they pay more than their fair share of taxes and get less than their fair of services. They were, and are, angry because their community is gerrymandered into districts that dilute their voting power. They were, and are, angry because their values are so often ignored by the people who wield power in their city.

Some people see this as a tyranny of the majority against a minority. In this case a sizeable one, about 40 percent of the entire city of Los Angeles is relegated to second-class citizenship in the Valley.

As far as I know, the Constitution of the United States establishes the nation and its government, defining the rights of the federal government and the states and the people. It doesn't say anything about cities, which, after all, are incorporated communities created within states - not constitutional entities.

You don't need to invoke the names of John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis or Abraham Lincoln. We're not talking about the Civil War in the San Fernando Valley. Nor are we talking about slavery, or the advent of cash crop agrarianism vs. the Industrial Revolution.

What we are talking about is fairness in city services - cleaning and paving our streets, police and parks - and fairness in taxation and user fees, like water and sewer rates, and fairness in political power when it comes to fighting for the values by which our local laws and decisions are made.

The first step in creating this fairness is to free the Valley to begin the process of secession if its people want that - to let everybody on both sides of the hill know that it could come to that.

Los Angeles is a broken city. It got that way because its political process is broken. It will never get well, it will never be a great city again until people from all its communities come together on an equal footing and start grappling with their differences and fixing the basic political structure that has fractured the city.

That could start to happen tomorrow if Senate Democrats come to their senses and reach for the compromise the Daily News advocated two weeks ago - a compromise that is precisely the position taken by the Los Angeles City Council three months ago in opposing the Boland bill.

Let secession be decided by a citywide vote, repeal the council's veto power. Let the people of Los Angeles get on with charter reform and the challenging process of rebuilding L.A. better than ever, together.

MEMO: Ron Kaye is managing editor of the Daily News.