Last Friday, the Assembly Transportation Committee staged a hearing in Los Angeles on the recent uptick in gasoline prices, and its members took turns attacking the rise and vowing to do something about it.

Two days later, The Sacramento Bee began publishing a detailed series of articles about the rising danger of catastrophic floods in the Sacramento area because levees along its rivers have not been maintained properly by the state.

What's the connection? The first event is a perfect example of how California legislators squander time on relatively trivial matters about which they can do nothing other than generate television sound bites and newspaper headlines.

The second is an equally perfect example of how California legislators sorely neglect the important public business they should be handling - such as protecting the Capitol from life-and property-threatening floods.

Gasoline prices go up and down like a yo-yo, mostly reflecting geopolitical factors and efforts by oil-producing nations to manipulate the petroleum market. And as the hearing was being staged, prices were already dropping a bit from last month's highs.

Nobody likes it when the prices go up, of course, but neither should we lose perspective about it. Why do we complain about $2-per-gallon gas - the end product of a complex process of extraction, transportation and refining - and willingly pay $8 a gallon for plain drinking water in plastic bottles?

Nor should we buy the blather by some California politicians that the state is being singled out for especially high prices. Gasoline prices tend to be higher here than in other states regardless of the overall market for the same reasons that other services and commodities are pricier. Business overhead is higher in California, and we have imposed some particular requirements on fuel formulation, as well as a carload of taxes.

Floods, on the other hand, are something that California lawmakers should be concerned about because the state bears much of the legal and financial responsibility for maintaining flood-control facilities and, as The Bee series laid out in excruciating detail, it has been neglecting that job. Levee maintenance has been reduced, critical bypass channels have been allowed to fill with silt, and emergency training has been neglected.

Just last month, the state Supreme Court indirectly ratified a lower court's ruling that the state is liable for a 1986 flood disaster along the Yuba River, when a levee break inundated the small community of Linda, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. The District Court of Appeal had concluded that the state was liable because it failed to repair a stretch of Yuba River levee. The state had shunned responsibility for the levee break and resisted the claims for nearly two decades.

No one yet knows for certain how much the state will have to pay victims of the flood, which destroyed or damaged 150 businesses and 3,000 homes, but it could easily approach $1 billion - no small sum for a state budget that's already many billions of dollars in the red.

The budget is in the red, running up $40 billion-plus in deficits over the last three years, because the Legislature and former Gov. Gray Davis didn't take care of the state's fiscal responsibilities any better than they tended to flood control. They treated a one-time revenue windfall in 2000 as if it were a perpetual cornucopia, thus plunging the state into deficits when revenues returned to their normal state. Their subsequent efforts to cover up their dereliction of duty with funny-money budgeting contributed, ironically enough, to the neglect of flood protection maintenance and preparation.

Virtually all of the lawmakers who are huffing and puffing about gasoline prices voted for those deficit-ridden budgets - and in doing so ceded any moral authority to criticize almost anyone else about undermining the public interest.

We cannot expect the state's politicians to solve all the problems of the world. And they shouldn't try. We should expect them to meet the responsibilities that they implicitly promised voters they would handle if elected. And until they start doing that fundamental job, we shouldn't pay much attention to anything they may say about anything else.