Clark Called Key as Roth Edges Beam in $1-Million Race

The bitter, $1-million race for Orange County supervisor ended shortly before dawn Wednesday with Anaheim Mayor Don R. Roth squeezing out a 1,087-vote win over Orange Mayor Jim Beam. Both candidates said the deciding factor in the race was an endorsement from the man Roth will replace.

Beam said he does not plan to seek a recount, and Roth said he was “still smarting” from some Beam campaign mail that “hit below the belt.”

The Orange mayor said the defeat “might have been the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“We’re disappointed, of course,” Beam said. “But fortunately I have other things in life than politics that are important to me.”

Lead Seesawed

As the votes were counted Tuesday night, the lead seesawed back and forth until Roth began to pull ahead after midnight. Finally, about 5 a.m., Roth and more than a dozen supporters who stayed with him through the night in his Anaheim hotel saw that there were too few votes left for him to lose.

The final count was 48,358, or 50.3% of the vote, for Roth and 47,271, or 49.2%, for Beam.

“I feel great,” Roth said Wednesday after receiving a morning tour of county offices from Supervisor Ralph B. Clark. It was a retirement announcement by Clark, a former Anaheim mayor who served 16 years as supervisor, that put the seat Roth won up for grabs.

Roth led the pledge of allegiance at the supervisors’ meeting Wednesday and then “shook hands with everybody and smiled and left,” he said.

When he takes office in January, Roth said, “I’m going to be a good listener at first, as I should be. I’ll get my feet planted on solid ground and represent the entire district. . . be very energetic, a knowledgeable individual and not afraid of work.”

Clark’s Key Endorsement

Roth said his endorsement by Clark late last week was “extremely important” in giving him the victory in a contest in which only 50% of the registered voters cast ballots.

Beam, too, said Clark’s endorsement was decisive. The endorsement came Wednesday, and by Saturday a mailer announcing it had gone out to all registered voters in the district--which includes Anaheim, part of Orange, La Palma and Buena Park.

Beam said a survey one month ago showed him with a seven-percentage-point lead in the race, and his consultants estimated Clark’s endorsement gained Roth six to 10 points.

Beam, 52, got 34.6% of the vote, or 20,257 ballots, in the June 3 primary, to 33.4%, or 19,543 votes, for Roth. Former Rep. Jerry M. Patterson (D-Santa Ana) got 26.2% and architect Manuel Mendez received 5.6% in the June election.

From January through election day, Beam spent more than $640,000 on the race, raising more than $200,000 of it in loans he concedes will not be repaid because a losing politician can’t raise money. Roth spent at least $430,000 in the same period, according to campaign disclosure statements.

$11 for Each Vote

The spending worked out to more than $11 for each vote cast, and Roth called the low turnout “disgusting to me personally.” He said some voters get “lackadaisical and say, ‘The only time I want to vote is when we elect a president.’ ” Another factor was “that the campaign got so--in my opinion--dirty that it turned people off.”

Roth attacked Beam as a “builder-developer” in political mailers but said Wednesday that he had no objection to specific developments, just a concern “that we’ve let growth get ahead of our ability to get people around (on county freeways and roads).”

Roth said he was especially upset by a Beam campaign mailer on Anaheim’s condemnation of a strawberry farmer’s land to build roads for a high-rise development, even though the mailer did not mention that the farmer later committed suicide. The farmer’s brother has said the suicide was not due solely to the city’s action.

Beam and Roth began the campaign as friends but were not talking to each other as the race ended. Beam telephoned his congratulations to Roth Wednesday, and Roth said it was possible that they could become friends again eventually.

But, “I’m not running over there with a bouquet of flowers today--that’s for sure,” Roth said.