UNLIMITED ARROGANCE AT CITY HALL.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

IN general, I can see the benefit of extending term limits for California's pols. Not to reward them for the mediocre work they do. It's just easier to keep track of how badly they are messing up -- or not, as the case may be -- when they aren't switching jobs every few years.

Cruz Bustamante, for example, might happily go on for another four more years in his highly unmemorable performance as Lt. Governor until a scandal eventually forces him into the private sector. But because of term limits, he will pull up stakes at the end of the year and put up a new tent over in the state insurance commissioner's office (at least, he's the candidate my money is on). Then he will have another two terms to go unnoticed while collecting his paycheck.

Bustamante is but one example this year. There are many more legislators looking to leap to other jobs rather than risk having to get a real job. All this movement makes it hard for even a reasonably well-informed voter to remember who's now a senator or still a member of the Assembly. < Talk about the unintended consequences of term limits. The state's business-card printing bill must be through the roof.

But Los Angeles City Council members, who are hoping voters will accidentally give them another term when they vote on a package of ethics reforms in November, don't deserve the same consideration. Not only should they not get a third four-year term, but they should have one taken away.

Evidently, four years is more than adequate time for a council member to transform from an idealist wanting to make the city great to a self- important politician with a sense of entitlement to the six-figure salary, indentured staff and deferential public. Who else would think up such a sneaky plot as overturning current term-limits by rushing a ballot measure that hides the true nature in supposed good-government provisions? On top of it, it would allow all the termed-out old timers to stage council comebacks.

They didn't even have the guts to introduce the term-limit measure themselves, but invented a farce about how the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters came up with the plan all on their lonesome, and at the last moment. Oops. They just love the current council members that much!

We voters may be dumb when it comes to Machiavellian municipal machinations, but that move is so obvious that only a group bowled over with its own wonderfulness would have the hubris to attempt it. If they honestly believe they are doing such a bang-up job running the city that they deserve a third term in office, they ought to be frank and open about it.

But if they did that, we might see the got-mine mentality behind it. This group wouldn't even be crafting job-extension plots if it weren't for term limits enacted 13 years ago that forced out the likes of Jackie Goldberg, Hal Bernson, Ruth Galanter, Cindy Miscikowski and Nate Holden. Do Eric Garcetti, Greig Smith, Tony Cardenas, Bill Rosendahl and Herb Wesson believe they had much of a shot at City Council jobs if their predecessors hadn't been forcibly ejected from City Hall?

Give them another four years on top of the eight they have already, and it would just encourage that kind of bad behavior. Who knows what kind of terrible policy would come out of that? The council has already started building its autocratic regime by cracking down on the public's access to City Hall.

Every year it seems they put more barriers, from segregating the public bathrooms into staff and visitors to perpetuating the security queues at the main door. Recently, the council has become bolder, cutting down the time for general public comment at its three-times-a-week meetings to just a few seconds. Last week, members came up with rules of decorum that empower them to shut off the microphones of speakers who are deemed out of line. It's not a great stretch to imagine a time when they see it as perfectly acceptable to shut out people with unpleasant points of view.

I don't think the voters are necessarily pro term limit, but the City Council has got to give them a better reason to extend the limits than just a possible return of Nate Holden. As fun as it would be to have him back on the horseshoe.