The last thing the cash-strapped city of Los Angeles needs right now is for its public agencies to grow. City officials are in the process of stripping existing departments to fill an ever-growing gap between revenue and and spending. Workers are taking unpaid days off. Layoffs loom.

The city needs fewer, not more, departmental mouths to feed.

Yet, inexplicably City Councilman Tony Cardenas is pushing for the creation of a new city department, even as the budget deficit grows. He's proposing the City Council vote to create Department of Youth Development, which will handle anti-gang programs and the associated $20 million or so appropriated for them.

Sounds like a government boondoggle just waiting to be born. Another city department means another staff of civil servants - and more opportunities for crucial crime fighting resources to be burned up by paper pushers.

Credit Cardenas with wanting to depoliticize the city's anti-gang works by taking it out from under the mayor's office, where the programs were placed last year. It's difficult if not impossible for a curious city official to vet the books of another. Witness the protracted legal battle between the city controller's office and the city attorney over auditing the worker's comp settlements.

But if Cardenas wants support for moving the gang programs out from under the mayor's nose, he's got to have a more compelling reason than the next mayor might screw up everything.

As well, he could gain crucial support if his proposal both depolitcized anti-gang efforts and saved money.

As it is, city officials are currently eyeing departments the could consolidate to save costs. And even Cardenas admits establishing a new city department will come with a price tag of $25 million. (Though, when did anything ever cost what a politician estimated? Remember when officials estimated $150 million for the newly opened downtown police headquarters that ended up costing nearly half a billion dollars?)

Until Cardenas can come up better plan, the City Council ought to leave the gang programs alone. There's no evidence that they are floundering under Villaraigosa watch. Indeed, it may be one of the few areas in which his administration has shone. Rev. Jeff Carr, the former gang czar who was recently promoted to chief of staff, has been widely praised in the city for his low-cost anti-gang programs that actually seem to work. Gang crime is down, despite the lagging economy, which suggests the city's anti-gang efforts are working.

That's not to say that the mayor's office is the right home to oversee gang programs. Indeed, if the city's anti-gang efforts are moved anywhere, they should go back to the department whence they came: the Los Angeles Police Department, that existing department of gang fighters.