JUST HOW LOW CAN A CITY REALLY GO? IF L.A. IS BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE THE VALLEY?

Byline: Kimit Muston

I think we all know Los Angeles municipal government is bad, but ``bad'' is a relative term and what can you compare City Hall to? What can you accurately say our City Hall is as ``bad'' as? The steering on the Titanic? Is it as bad as the management of that 18th century English mental hospital, Bedlam? Or can you only vaguely assert it's as ``bad'' as it gets?

Well, the Reason Public Policy Institute has recently released a study of efficiency in municipal government which provides some independent quantification of our badness.

The study, which compares cities with each other on standardized measuring scales, ranks Los Angeles City Hall 44th in efficient use of taxpayers' money. We would have been lower on the list but the list only goes down to 44.

That's right, folks. Based on the evidence provided (and not provided) by the Los Angeles bureaucracy, L.A. is the least-efficient city with taxpayer money in the United States. Or as the Reason folks so tactfully described us, ``Worst Overall, Bottom Of The Barrel.''

We're talking about the cost of filling a pot hole, responding to an ambulance call, running a street sweeper or keeping a book on a library shelf.

Every city does these things. Some manage to pay less per pothole than others. Our city manages to pay more.

You want to know how bad things really are? The study notes that ``Slow growing cities tend to be more efficient ...'' than fast growing ones, and that seems logical. But the average city in the study grew by almost 9 percent over the six years data were collected, while L.A. grew by only 3 percent. And we still made the bottom of the list.

Buffalo, New York, beat us. Boston beat us. So did Detroit. Cincinnati, where they just had a riot, beat us by 14 places.

It gets worse. The institute judged that the Los Angeles Fire Department ranked as one of the best in the country at putting every dime on the street. But this magnificent display of respect for both the taxpayers and the people being served could only drag the rest of the city bureaucrats up to last place.

The mayor, of course, a defender of the downtown morass approach to government, dismissed the study as flawed and based on ``faulty data,'' which is the way bureaucrats deal with critics who use the faulty data the city grudgingly supplies to them when they ask for information about where their tax dollars have disappeared to.

Actually, I think the Reason folks were very restrained in theirconclusions. It rather blandly stated, ``Los Angeles was not at all helpful in providing data,'' as opposed to saying, ``Those red-tape mavins stonewalled us,'' which is what a lot of community activists here have been saying for decades.

I have long suspected that the City Hall swamp of responsibility was designed by the same folks who built the La Brea Tar Pits; taxpayers' hopes and dreams fall in and starve to death, only to be pulled out later as curiosities. (``They actually wanted to build a museum in the Valley? Amazing!'')

We ought to make the bureaucracy a tourist stop. ``Visit the Hall of Public Records and see the amazing disappearing public records; they exist only when you don't wish to see them. And not at all under the file name you requested. And we can't reveal the file name unless you already know it. Allow all day, day after day, to truly appreciate this confounding exhibit. And then relax with a cappuccino in the Memorial Hall of Frustrated Politicians and Exhausted Activists.''

The purpose of the Reason report was not to publicly humiliate the bureaucrats at City Hall. That was just an unexpected bonus.

What is really sad about the institute's report is that it only measured services in Los Angeles as a whole. Thanks to the Local Agency Formation Commission's report on secession, which - 26 years after state law mandated the city do it - broke down city revenues and expenditures by ZIP codes, we now know that every year the Valley sends $123 million more to City Hall than it gets back in services.

So if L.A. is the bottom of the barrel, then the Valley is somewhere far below the bottom.

Face it, we're in the sub-basement. Canadians must get more from our property and sales taxes than we do. We live in The Land of Really Bad Government. And now we have something to compare it to.

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Photo: (color) no caption (Los Angeles)

Edna Trunnell/Staff Photographer