For nearly a decade, Los Angeles County’s major annual ritual was the week of daylong sessions that comprised the Hall of Administration budget hearings. We all had to plan our lives around them.And then this year, the unimaginable happened: This year, the hearings somehow slipped past almost unnoticed. It felt as though the local course of history had suddenly changed. Ever since the regional economy tilted in 1991, the county hearings, with their testimony of slashed services and affected clienteles, were like an open-mike night at the Tragedy Club. This, of course, was because for five years, all the news about county finances that wasn’t bad was worse. Assessments and revenues fell, libraries were closed, services were cut, health and welfare programs were slashed. Stopgap remedies failed, employees were laid off, jobs went unfilled. Busloads of demonstrators disembarked at the Hall of Administration and filled its 680-seat hearing room every day. All had come to beg that their jobs or their programs be saved. You couldn’t ignore the annual hearing drama even if you wanted to. The media got plenty of advance warning, and there were further reminders once the hearings started. News releases were stuffed under our county press-office doors. Messages from human-service providers (I guess those are what our parents once called “charities”) filled our answering-machine tapes. Beseeching letters and petitions crammed our mailboxes. Rising poverty and declining service levels intersected right there in the boardroom, as the five distinctly overwhelmed supervisors struggled with the consequences of Proposition 13, as deferred by a dozen years of Southland prosperity and intensified by the board’s myopic generosity toward high-level county pensions and salaries. The county then nearly went bankrupt, pulled back from the brink, and under the board’s first liberal majority in years, staggered aimlessly from the edge. For another half-decade, however, the sounds of crumbling infrastructure and threnodies of woe still filled the air at budget time. But this year the blare of protest was scarcely heard. There were wage increases for most county employees instead of cutbacks. The overall budget seemed actually sound (although there’ve been rumblings of deficit problems by the year 2000. But heck, that’s practically in the next millennium). And all the usual demonstrations on Temple Street, the boardroom crowds, the processions of speakers and the desperate calls and faxes, the papers shoved under the door, the mailings, just didn’t happen. So I for one was blindsided. When I mumbled something to a countyside friend in the middle of last week about it probably being about time to wander down to the boardroom and sit through the year’s remaining budget agony, he told me that I was already too late. The budget had all been presented and passed the previous day, he said. The entire process had been wrapped in about two hours. I scoffed