When local government officials gather Friday to announce that they have qualified an initiative for the statewide ballot to protect their finances from raids by the Legislature and the governor, they will have completed their transformation from political doormats to political players. They'll then have about seven months - until the November election - to prove that they can stay in the game.

But win or lose, the mayors, county supervisors and appointed city officials who make up the local government coalition have accomplished something extraordinary: They have converted public tax dollars into their own private assets to build a political organization designed to sway the voters to their point of view.

Whether you believe in their cause or not, and I'll get to the substance of their argument in a minute, voters might want to think twice this fall before blessing the concept of public officials using public money for political purposes.

The officials, and their lawyers, argue that they are doing no such thing. And legally speaking, they might be right. The law appears to allow them to behave this way. But there is still something very distasteful about it.

The effort is led by the League of California Cities, made up of municipal governments from across the state. The league has donated more than $1 million toward the cause and budgeted $1 million more for the ballot campaign to come. The California State Association of Counties has pledged $1 million.

Where does that money come from? In the league's case, some of it comes from rents earned on an office building in downtown Sacramento originally purchased with public funds. Years ago, the cities each paid an amount toward buying the building, about three blocks from the Capitol, and the mortgage has long since been paid off. Now all the revenue from rent goes into a fund that the league's managers consider the private business of its non-profit corporation.

"We have been saving this money for many years," says Chris McKenzie, the league's executive director, "because we knew this day would come." But that money never would have been there if the taxpayers hadn't first invested in the building. Nor, really, would the other sources of income for the league's political fund: revenue from trade shows at its annual conference or from publications.

It seems a stretch even to think of the league as a private entity. Its employees are paid with tax dollars contributed by the member cities, and they are eligible for pensions through the state's public employee retirement system. The league also considers itself subject to the state's open-meetings and public-records laws. But the league's nonprofit corporate status and the idea that it can segregate its "public" and "non-public" funds allow the organization to get around laws forbidding the use of tax dollars for political purposes.

This is not just a technicality. The same mentality rests at the heart of the ballot measure that the league and other local government groups will push this fall. Its intent sounds laudable: to prevent the state from taking local funds. It's about stopping "them" from doing it again, to "us."

But step back a bit, and much of the logic falls apart. There is no them and us. It's all "we." A city resident is also a county resident and a state resident.

Although I am a strong advocate for local control of government revenue and decisions, I think the local government initiative, like everything the league does, views the world more through the eyes of city employees than city residents. To a resident, it might make perfect sense for more property taxes to go to the schools and less to garbage collection. But a city official sees any such shift as a violation of his sacred ground.

The local officials are right about one thing: California's entire system of financing state and local government is a mess. Too much of the revenue is raised by one set of officials and spent by another, and the distance between the two is a recipe for fiscal mismanagement. The uncertain nature of everybody's revenue base also can be a major problem.

The way to fix that is through comprehensive reform that looks at what is best for all of the citizens of California, not the residents, or employees, of a particular city or county. Freezing the current distribution of tax revenue in place would only lock in a flawed system and make genuine reform more difficult.

But even if you agree that the city and county officials have a good proposal, their methods should concern you. If they want to create a political movement to protect their interests, they should do it by raising private money, given voluntarily to their cause, and not by co-opting and transforming tax dollars into a publicly funded political machine.