SOARING LEGAL EAGLE OR YAPPY LAP DOG? MERKIN'S STUCK TELLING COUNCIL WHAT IT WANTS TO HEAR - SENSIBLE OR NOT.

Byline: Kimit Muston Local View

I feel sorry for lawyers. They suffer the drudgery of law school and then grueling state bar exams for the opportunity of arguing some client's position in public. And if the client is a fool it's very difficult for the lawyer not to sound like one, too.

Which describes the plight of Frederick N. Merkin, senior counsel for the city of Los Angeles.

Merkin has had a distinguished legal career up to this point. He graduated from Stanford Law in 1972 and went to work for the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office the very next year. By 1983, he was defending the city before the United States Supreme Court. As a lawyer you can't get more impressive than that.

For the past few years, Merkin has been reduced to being the legal mouthpiece for the incoherent intransigence of City Hall on the issue of Valley independence. In that role, he has said a couple of the dumbest things I have ever heard come out of a lawyer's briefcase.

Back in 1999 when citizens from the Valley asked the Local Agency Formation Commission to study what a new Valley city might look like, Merkin was legally outraged. Speaking for City Hall, he objected to any county agency offering assistance to the secession movement.

``It's the applicant's responsibility to define what city it wants,'' he testified. Merkin's argument implied that the county of Los Angeles had no right to defend its citizens in their argument against the city.

By extension of Merkin's position, government is a private club whose individual members (state, county and municipal) must close ranks against ``them'' - the citizens and taxpayers.

That argument was rejected by LAFCO.

The city immediately hinted that it would appeal the decision in court and that promised to be just the beginning of an endless stream of legally absurd lawsuits which would tie up secession in the courts for decades, which is how New York City has held on to Staten Island for the past 200 years.

The state Assembly responded with AB 2838, signed into law in the fall of 2000, which limits any lawsuits over LAFCO decisions to allegations of ``fraud or prejudicial abuse of discretion'' by individual commission members.

That law has reduced Merkin's arguments before LAFCO to a series of amusing and infuriating statements meant largely to confuse the electorate about the issues, such as the letter sent to LAFCO last November, which Merkin co-wrote.

That letter threatened that City Hall might require the new Valley city to buy all parks and municipal buildings in the Valley. The bill would have been in the billions.

It was an opinion without legal precedent. It claimed rights for City Hall in the Valley, but ignored any rights Valley taxpayers might have to city property outside of the Valley.

It placed the equivalent of an illegal poll tax on a vote for secession and it reduced all taxpayers in Los Angeles to the level of serfs, tied to City Hall until they could buy their freedom at the price required by City Hall.

Not surprisingly, LAFCO rejected Merkin's argument out of hand.

It's depressing to see legal talent such as Merkin's so debased by his client's foolishness. His pronouncements in defense of the denizens of City Hall have begun to sound more like the bark of a legal lap dog than cry of a legal eagle.

As proof of this, there is Merkin's most recent opinion, which has nothing to do with Valley independence. At least not directly.

Dennis Zine took office as a city councilman on July 2 but delayed his retirement from the LAPD until January - not, he says, because the additional six months meant an extra $13,803 a year in pension for him, but only because his son was graduating from the police academy in January, and he wanted to ``pass the torch.''

Unfortunately for his torch, state law requires all governmental employees to retire the moment they take elective office and fixes their pension as of that date.

Well, whomever Councilman Zine was carrying this particular flame for, he immediately asked Merkin to come up with a legal opinion which would allow him to keep the money.

This is the best Merkin could do: Los Angeles is such a special place state law does not apply here.

Neither does the law of gravity.

And they wonder why we want to leave.