A little more than a week ago, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa delivered his annual State of the City address. The mayor’s speech was fascinating for the usual reasons, but this year it was extra special.

“These are no ordinary times in the city of Los Angeles,” the mayor said, which was the first falsehood. While he painted the grim picture of “230,000 Angelenos now standing on unemployment lines” and a “jobless rate simmering at 12 percent and rising,” he spent the bulk of his address triangulating schemes to avoid any city layoffs while offering virtually no help to the private sector.

Not a single city worker has been laid off. The private sector has borne the entire brunt of the recession, but the public employee unions are the mayor’s primary concern. So these must be ordinary times since its business as usual at City Hall.

The second whopper involves the magnitude of the deficit. The Los Angeles Unified School District budget is independent of the rest of Los Angeles government. However, most of us consider the schools to be one of the primary functions of a city – police, fire, sanitation, roads and schools – right? So how deep is the actual hole?

L.A. faces a $530 million hole next fiscal year, and the LAUSD gap is $600 million. In reality, we are $1.1 billion dollars in the red with catastrophic projections for 2010. This despite one of the highest tax rates in the country and a remarkably generous – some might argue, reckless – electorate that votes “yes” on nearly every school bond and revenue racket stuffed onto the ballot. The mayor is only on the hook for about half a billion, but we’re stuck with the whole tab.

The State of the City address was delivered among a friendly crowd of political supporters and various Spring Street camp followers at the Balqon Electric Truck factory in Harbor City. The mayor showered love on Balqon as the place where “L.A.’s economic future starts.”

And he might be right. Balqon received $527,000from the Port of Los Angeles and the South Coast Air Quality Management District and then sells itstrucks back to the Port of Los Angeles for more taxpayer money. So, the future of L.A.’s economy is a company that lives on public funds.

How long would Balqon last if the taxpayer umbilical cord was cut? With all of our natural advantages companies ought to be fighting to come to L.A., sadly, we have to cut checks to attract business. We even have to bribe the Academy Awards to stay!

You have to give it to the mayor – he’s never lacking the vision thing. He talked about our “Clean Tech Corridor” up the 110 Freeway that “could create as many as 1,000 high-paying jobs.”

Meanwhile, we’re shedding the jobs we currently have at an alarming rate and taxing the surviving businesses into oblivion. While the mayor dreams of a city where “residents walk more, drive less,” we just want the streets paved and the schools to function. While Los Angeles struggles to get the basics right today, we’re offered pie-in-the-sky visions of a digital tomorrow.

Politically, the mayor has a giant problem. He wants to be governor but what record does he run on? Imagine this commercial: “Hi, I’m Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles. I was the front man for Measure B which lost. I’m a big supporter of Measures 1A through 1F, which are going down in flames. I barely got 55 percent of the vote against amateur politicians with no money, and my city has a billion-dollar budget deficit and leads the nation in poor, homelessness and the uninsured. Vote for me so I can do for California what I’ve done for Los Angles.”

Yikes! No wonder he’s velcroed to Bill Bratton. Crime is down, and that’s a good thing.

But if the mayor can’t become governor or grab an Obama administration gig, which would be a godsend, he may actually have to say no to the unions and ask the developers to pay their fair share.

He may have to pay attention to the million little details of city life that he finds boring but are the difference between a great mayor and a politician who’s only interested in moving up another rung on the power ladder. He may actually have to create a business friendly Los Angeles that creates tax-generating revenue rather than tax-consuming need.

I’m sorry to report the State of the City remains denial.