New York City is outrageously expensive to tourists and residents alike -- so expensive that it often seems like money doesn't mean much. So perhaps it is left to others outside the city to marvel at how money gets thrown around in the city.

We were fully prepared to do just that when learning that Michael Bloomberg spent about $69 million of his own money to win a term as New York's mayor. After all, that's about $92.60 a vote. (Hey, he could get a pretty good seat for the staggeringly expensive "The Producers" Broadway show for what he spent on one voter. In fact, he could have gotten 744,757 of them for the total sum.) Then we got to thinking whether Mr. Bloomberg's number was as eye-popping as it seemed.

Yes, he outspent Jon Corzine, who plunked down about $63 million of his own to win a Senate seat from New Jersey, and Steve Forbes, who unburdened himself of about $48 million in his 2000 presidential race. And, yes, he made California's big spenders of years past -- Al Checchi and Michael Huffington who could only scrape together about $70 million between them -- look like political paupers. But how much more impressive are Mr. Bloomberg's numbers than, say, Riverside's own Sam Cardelucci's.

The recount in his unsucessful race to unseat Mayor Ron Loveridge is in. Mr. Cardelucci picked up a paltry 14 votes, but that's not what matters here. If he ends up having spent $400,000 of his own money (his estimated upper limit), he will have spent about 75 bucks a vote ($56.26 at the lower estimate of $300,000). That's not half bad, by Bloomberg, Corzine, Checchi or Huffington standards, even if not quite enough to get into "The Producers."

And, anyway, what's the big difference, besides $17.60, between the Bloomberg-Cardelucci spending per vote? It's that New York got a man who convinced its voters that he, with his business background, was best equipped to rebuild that part of the city devastated by the World Trade Center attacks. Riverside got a man none too happy about his company losing contracts to haul trash in the city. Frankly, most people would rather have the 75 bucks, chip in a few dollars and go see "The Producers." But we do appreciate the experience once again of learning not to be too impressed by individual fortunes placed into political campaigns, whether in New York or Riverside.

Broken trust

What's it going to take to make the Interior Department get serious about missing Indian trust funds?

Hard to say. Look what's happened in just the last week: A federal judge in Washington ordered Interior Secretary Gale Norton to show why she should not be held in contempt for failure to make a serious run at the problem. It was disclosed that the same judge had authorized a computer expert to hack into the trust fund computer system, and that he'd done it -- creating a false account, altering another -- without being detected and with "deplorable and inexcusable" ease. And it was revealed that a special master, appointed by the judge to investigate the funds, has called on the judge to seize control of the whole system.

Really: What's up with this? Some of these trust funds are over a century old. They hold the money owed to tribes and individuals for the sale of resources -- oil, gas, timber -- from reservation lands. They should have held billions of dollars. Complaints from tribes have been mounting for a decade that hundreds of millions of dollars seemed to have disappeared. Nothing happened until 1996, when Elouise Cobell, a Blackfoot tribe member from Montana, filed suit. Revelations have cascaded out of the case -- and federal authorities have done almost nothing about it.

The computer hacker's report was damning not just because of the ease of the intrusion, but because the federal judge first expressed alarm about inadequate protection of this system two years ago. It's one of the many things that would already have been under active review and remedy had anybody at Interior, from Secretary Norton down, attacked the problem with due diligence.

There are a lot of problems here, but this one seems more and more apparent. It's time to get the civil auditors out of this mess, and the criminal investigators in.

Walkways to the beach

A couple of decades after the state began collecting promises to increase public beach access, it seems to be trying to honor some of them. That was the message, at least, when the Coastal Conservancy changed course last week and agreed to work to open beach walkways.

It won't be an easy path. Many of these access points cross oceanfront estates in such ritzy places as Malibu and affect people such as producer David Geffen and rock star Eddie Van Halen. Lawsuits could fly. Already environmentalist and cell phone pioneer Wendy McCaw is locked in litigation to block public access near her bluff-top home in Santa Barbara.

But it is not as if the state is confiscating private property. These walkways -- 1,269 of them all the way up the coast to Mendocino County -- were deeded to the public in exchange for permission to develop precious coastal land into trophy estates and beachfront homes. After development, too often, fences went up; leaving the public to stare at the sand through chain link.

Spend some time looking for coastal access outside crowded state beaches and the need is obvious. However, the tide is going out on some of these deeds because they are about to expire and the would-be access lost for good.

The Coastal Conservancy, a state agency, agreed two years ago to begin working to open these walkways but has done nothing since. Last week, in voting to get cracking, the agency seems to have rediscovered its original mandate to increase public access to the ocean.