Russians Get Quick Civil Service Course : Government: Visiting Moscow officials, after a whirlwind look at L.A.’s budgeting and bureaucracy, conclude: ‘We have so much to do.’

Visiting Russian politicians Thursday received a down-to-earth lesson on the Civil Service system in Los Angeles.

Make that a down-into-the-earth lesson.

It was delivered in an elevator traveling between the third floor and the basement of City Hall as four members of the Moscow City Council wrapped up a four-day course in municipal management.

The Russians were seeking ideas for the reorganization of Moscow’s city government as part of the democratization of Russia. The elevator was taking them between meetings arranged by City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky and there was no time for chitchat.

“We have so many questions,” said Alexander A. Plokhin, chairman of the Budget and Finance Committee of the 450-member Moscow City Council. “We have so much to do.”

It fell to council aide Samantha Beigel to quickly answer the Civil Service question.

She explained that Civil Service is an employment system that insulates government workers from political pressure and patronage as elected officials come and go. The problem is it sometimes makes it hard to get rid of poor employees, she added.

The Russians nodded knowingly. There are more than a few leftover bureaucrats still gumming up the works in their own reform-minded country, they said.

For that reason, Plokhin and council colleagues Pavel V. Romanov, Yury V. Shmirkov and Vladislav Y. Kattchan listened intently as Los Angeles City Controller Rick Tuttle explained how his office keeps on the lookout for waste and goldbricking.

“We’re just in the process of starting democratic rule,” Plokhin told him. “The citizens never realized how much of their salaries went to taxes. . . . They never knew how to make government more responsive.”

A few minutes later in the City Hall basement, the Russians watched workers in a computerized traffic control center respond to traffic jams at major intersections.

Ed Rowe, Transportation Department general manager, demonstrated how pavement sensors and TV cameras keep tabs on traffic flow and allow technicians to override traffic signals.

The Russians and officials of the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Department of Airports discussed public agencies’ private business dealings. They spent five hours studying the budget projection process with City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie and his staff and continued the discussion with Chief Legislative Analyst William McCarley.

They also met with officials of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, the city Fire Department, the mayor’s office, the Southern California Assn. of Governments, the state Department of Insurance and editors of the Los Angeles-based Russian-language newspaper Panorama.

The visitors left weighed down with documents and reports--including a fat bound volume containing the state insurance code. Kattchan said it could end up being the model used to regulate Russia’s first private insurance industry.

Yaroslavsky, chairman of the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee, paid for the Russians’ stay with campaign funds. Their U.S. travel expenses were covered by money from the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. Yaroslavsky met the four officials last year in the Soviet Union during two institute-sponsored seminars on municipal finance.

“For them, this trip has been a graduate class in municipal finance. And a freshman class in Poli Sci 1,” he said.