RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP COMMISSIONS TORPEDO SOUND GOVERNMENT.

Byline: Kimit Muston Local View

I am sure you are familiar with the four fundamental forms of government: monarchy, theocracy, dictatorship and republic.

But here in Los Angeles we have invented a fifth form; a murky dilution of power that is ripe for abuse and misuse by the obtuse. I call it ``Buroc-o-mittie-ship.''

Under the City Charter the single most important duty of the mayor and City Council is the appointment of the 230 odd commissioners to the more than 30 boards and commissions that oversee the daily operations of the bureaucracy, such as the Building and Safety Commission, the Board of Zoning Appeal, the City Ethics Commission, the Planning Commission and the Rent Adjustment Commission.

There are also the Commission on the Status of Women, the Commission on Children, Youth and Families and the Human Relations Commission; the Cultural Affairs Commission, the Cultural Heritage Commission, the Disability Commission and the Disability Access Commission.

Each of these commissions has a paid staff. But except for a handful, the commissioners themselves are all unpaid, part-time managers who perform their oversight duties commensurate with their salary.

This explains how Adelphia, the cable company that services 250,000 households in Los Angeles, could miss paying six years of quarterly fees to the Department of Information and Technology - about $3 million total - while I get a nasty letter when I am two days late paying a parking ticket.

Adelphia is currently in bankruptcy, its stock is now worth pennies and its CEO and half of his family are under indictment for looting billions from the company over the past decade.

Meanwhile, none of the 774 city DIT employees noticed the missed payments, or at least none of them notified their oversight board or the press.

And none of the five commissioners on the Information and Technology Board stumbled upon any missing payments during their intensive four hours of oversight each month. Forty-eight hours of oversight a year for a department with a $110 million budget? That's like trying to run the entire federal government from some ranch in the middle of no-where Texas!

Most of the oversight commissioners admit they are at the mercy of the staffs they are supposed to be overseeing. They only know what the staff tells them.

So why keep such a cumbersome, complicated, convoluted and corrupted system when it seems common sense it is little more than a disaster waiting to happen - again, and again, and again?

Because to City Hall these commissions function like high brush for a stalking lion or a getaway car for a bank robber.

Let me give you an example. Before he became the ex-mayor, Richard Riordon had a plan to expand Los Angeles Airport and had hired a public relations firm, Winner & Associates, to sell that plan.

When Jimmy Hahn became mayor, the Riordon plan was scrapped; politics as usual. But this presented a problem because Winner had helped get Jimmy elected - giving money, raising money - and Winner didn't feel it should suffer because its boy had won.

But even City Hall can't defend hiring a PR firm to sell a dead plan. Except maybe it can, because the Airport Commission recommended a $1.5 million extension for the Winner contract. The president of the Airport Commission just happens to be Ted Stein, major financial supporter of ... yes, Jimmy Hahn.

The council gagged on the contract but you can't blame City Hall for trying, and I mean that in a completely legal sense. It could never be proved in court that the Airport Commission was trying to use $1.5 million of taxpayer money to pay back the mayor's political debt, but that's only because there is so much quid-pro-quoing going on around the commissions that connecting any two specific acts together is like trying to find the specific mosquito that gave you malaria.

That's the beauty of a Buroc-o-mittie-ship! It's opaque, impervious to light and criminal investigations.

Remember Adelphia? In its secret negotiations for a new contract, company officials sort of coughed up $2 million, most of their 6-year-old debt. They placed it in an escrow account, so they didn't actually pay it to the city.

City Hall then awarded them a 45-day extension on their old contract.

Adelphia used that time to immediately announced a rate increase. Sound's like it's pretty confident of getting that new contract.

I guess that means somebody will be paying those late fees. I wonder who that will be.