You gotta hand it to Kenny Hahn's daughter.

Janice knows how to work an audience.

No sooner does Chair Alex Padilla call the meeting of the City Council's Education and Neighborhoods Committee to order the morning of Feb. 14 than he reminds everybody that it is Valentine's Day.

Fellow committee member Janice Hahn is having none of it, please.

She bemoans the fact that she is single, "not in a relationship," had to order her coffee that morning in a Starbucks festooned with hearts, and she was not into Valentine's Day at all that morning, thank you.

I stifle my urge to run up and ask her for a date because, well, who wants to drive all the way to the harbor to sweet-talk about City Hall politics?

I can do that in Palms any day of the week.

How come I was a witness to all this badinage (French for "kidding around')?

On Tuesday, Feb. 14, I took the 7:42 a.m. Commuter Express bus No. 431 downtown to give Mayor Villaraigosa and the City Council a Valentine bearing the names of 251 Westside Villagers.

It was in the form of a sweet-talking petition asking for "whatever steps are necessary to allow the area east of the 405 San Diego Freeway and south of National Boulevard to help form and then join a proposed Palms-Westside Village Neighborhood Council."

Sexy, huh?

Anyway, I was finally able to hand the Westside Village billet-doux (that's French for "gentle note") to the clerk of the City Council's Education and

Neighborhoods Committee just as the committee was wrapping up its meeting, shortly after 10 a.m. Janice had already left.

The only council member present was the new committee chair, Alex Padilla. The others — Hahn and Jose Huizar — were gone because the City Council meeting had begun.

In fact, a uniformed sergeant-at-arms had just been in the room gently urging Hahn to get her booty into the Council chambers so the meeting could start. She did.

(That's Janice at the controls of a refurbished Pacific Electric railroad car back in 2002 — don't ya just love a gal in a uniform?)

Now I understand what the new council president, Eric Garcetti, meant when he said he wants his meetings to begin ON TIME.

Padilla, who is from the Northeast San Fernando Valley, looked like he had not a clue as to what I was talking about when I explained how Westside Village had been swallowed up by Mar Vista.

(Where ARE these towns? he seemed to convey.)

But he'll learn, because I plan to haunt his committee every time it meets until the members succumb and give us the ordinance we want.

Next, I found my way to the mayor's office and asked for Deputy Mayor Larry Frank, the guy who is in charge of neighborhoods.

"Everybody is in a staff meeting," a receptionist said. (Very nicely, too, I must say. I hope he is paid well.)

So I left a copy of the billet-doux with him and returned to Palms via the Venice Blvd. bus, where everybody looked pretty grumpy — I think they needed Janice Hahn aboard to liven up the atmosphere.

But that might mean she was still looking for love in all the wrong places.