L.A.: Will for cash

The Jack of beanstalk fame swapped his family’s last cow for a few beans. A moronic deal in the business world, but in the world of storybooks, they naturally turned out to be enchanted, and Jack’s fortune was made. Just don’t try that here; even in fertile California, there are no magic frijoles, however much manure gets spread around.

And brace yourselves for a whole lot of it. From Yreka to San Ysidro, official California is busted flat. We’re so broke that Fabian Nunez is probably drinking Two-Buck Chuck.

The temptations to make ends meet with corporate/civic deals are enormous. Budget Helper recipes can be a blessing for cities and states through the lean years, or they can become desperate sellouts that elected bodies can’t scrape off their shoes once times turn good again.

And the line between good and bad can be as thin as a delta smelt, and just as fragile. Take the Los Angeles Central Library. Mayor Richard Riordan’s notion of selling the downtown library building -- to a Philip Morris company -- and then leasing it back justifiably went nowhere. This isn’t just some building; it’s the city’s patrimony. But years earlier, after an arson fire chewed up a chunk of that patrimony, another notion -- selling the library’s “air rights” to builders -- made sense, and that deal paid for the handsome rebuilding and restoration of a cherished piece of the city’s cultural legacy.

Now there’s a deal in Santa Barbara, which still needs an “OK” stamp from the county, the state and the feds. It was struck between a Houston oil company and environmentalists who don’t come much greener than Santa Barbarans. (They remember 1969, when the tide washed in tens of thousands of gallons of spilled crude oil along with the dead dolphins and seabirds it had killed.)

The oil company is willing to hand over 200 acres of immaculate coastal property to an environmental land trust, drop plans for a housing development on another chunk of land, fork over 3,700 choice acres for parkland and write checks for millions for carbon-offset projects. In exchange, the company gets to stick its drilling straw beneath the ocean and suck out perhaps 200 million barrels of oil. With oil at $113 a barrel, it’s a steal for the company and not a bad bargain for the rest of us -- and the enviros are persuaded that this time the oil operation isn’t going to blow.

The city of L.A. is looking down into a $400-million budget abyss that would make anyone skittish. All the more important that the city not get stampeded over the cliff by problematic deal-making.

Exhibit A: The recent billboard deal. We live in the biggest park-poor city in the country, and it’s the poorest parts of town that are the most park-less. Match that with the fact that the billion-dollar billboard companies have challenged, defied and flouted L.A. every time it tries to control their eyesore business. The deal would let two seven-story billboards go up alongside the 10 Freeway in exchange for “a portion” of the revenues going “toward” creating a nine-acre wetland park in South L.A.

A portion? Toward? Given the billboard companies’ track record and take-home pay, they should be footing the bill for the entire park, down to the picnic benches. Scratch that -- make it three or four such parks. A little ugly should pay for a lot of pretty.

You see the dangers that desperation can lead to. The chain saw that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking to the state budget could condemn child care and elderly care centers to inspections only once every seven years. If the industry helpfully offers to save us money by inspecting the centers itself, just remember the airlines’ rather chummy safety inspection arrangement with the FAA and what it got us.

But the same anorexic state budget would cut 38 game wardens from a program that’s already so anemic that only one in every four tips about poachers gets investigated. Would it be so terrible if Tony the Tiger’s cereal company, or even the Detroit Tigers -- sticking to an animal theme here -- ponied up a little cash and in return got a little logo printed on state park information, as long as it meant that California wildlife and wild places could be better protected?

Some matchmaking could be enormously profitable for the corporations, and it’s these deals that deserve enormous scrutiny up front, like the idea floated first by Riordan and recently in these pages of leasing LAX operations to a private company. And every deal should be “sunsetted” -- assigned an expiration date so that officialdom could re-up or pull the plug.

The warning label on all these deals is that government should never rewrite its own job description; it should never be so seduced by easy bling as to hand over the job of governance to the highest bidder. Just because someone pays for a ride in the stagecoach doesn’t mean you give him the reins.

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Come to L.A.’s red-ink rescue: It’ll take will and imagination to plug the city’s $400-million budget deficit. What are your outside-the-box ideas to save money? Pick up trash only every other week? Turn the Getty House into a bed and breakfast? E-mail them here. I’ll write up the best, and we’ll see whether City Hall bites.