A Bitter Campaign Won, Roth Is Now Ready to Step Into Supervisor’s Role

As he walked the streets of Anaheim Hills in search of votes two months ago, Don R. Roth remembered that he had done much the same thing 57 years earlier and 2,000 miles away.

“I had an interest in politics all my life,” Roth said. “My dad was a Republican precinct worker in Illinois when I was a kid. I walked my first precinct when I was 8 or so for a governor named Green.”

In October, Roth was at it again. Then the mayor of Anaheim, he went door to door to solicit votes in his race for Orange County supervisor.

His reasons sounded simple enough. He told members of the Lincoln Club, an Orange County Republican group, that he “needed the job.” He told voters in Anaheim that his election would “keep Anaheim’s seat on the Board of Supervisors.” He was running for the seat being vacated by retiring Supervisor Ralph B. Clark, also a former Anaheim mayor.

When the polls closed Nov. 4, his persuasiveness remained in doubt. Not until about 5 a.m. the next day did Roth and the dozen or so supporters who watched the returns throughout the night figure out that it was mathematically impossible for his opponent, Orange Mayor Jim Beam, to win.

After 13 months of campaigning, with each candidate spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, Roth got 50.3% of the vote to 49.2% for Beam. The 1,072-vote margin of victory prompted friends to jokingly call him “Landslide Don.”

Monday at 10 a.m., in the Hall of Administration in Santa Ana, Roth will take office as one of Orange County’s five supervisors. He will be sworn in by his son, Randall, a Portland, Ore., minister.

Roth, then a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy, settled in Anaheim in 1955, when he was transferred to the Naval Air Station at Los Alamitos. Roth boned up on real estate and got a salesman’s license while still in the Navy. After retiring from military service in 1963, he became a real estate broker.

As he moved into the world of residential real estate, Roth also became active in the community, working in school board and council elections. In December, 1970, he was appointed to fill Clark’s unexpired City Council term.

He lost in two subsequent races for the council but won in 1976 and had been on the council ever since, serving as mayor since 1982. When Clark announced last year that he would not seek reelection to the supervisor’s post he held for 16 years, Roth declared his candidacy.

Since his election to the $55,000-a-year county post, Roth has made the rounds of county offices, meeting with department heads and workers. He has decided to keep all of Clark’s aides on his staff, at least for the time being.

Roth has said that he has no grand plans in his new job.

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

The district includes Anaheim, La Palma, Buena Park and part of Orange. There are only tiny islands of unincorporated territory, unlike South County, and little opportunity for a supervisor to make his presence felt directly.

But the supervisors are responsible for a $1.4-billion budget and administer a range of state-mandated programs, many of them in health care and social services. They also wrestle with the operation of John Wayne Airport and county jails.

In an interview last week, Roth repeated that he plans to move cautiously at first, characterizing his meetings with other supervisors and county employees in the last eight weeks as “just kind of getting a feeling of what’s going on.”

“There’s some interesting programs I’ve never dealt with as far as the city’s concerned--welfare, aid to dependent children, the Probation Department--so there’s some catching up to do,” he said.

“I used to say that Anaheim has a budget of well over $1 million a day, thinking that was a lot of money, but when you talk about a budget of $1.4 billion--and that is more than 17 states in the union--you realize the importance of good management and good leadership for the county.”

Two major problems cutting across district lines are transportation and development. Roth heard about these issues over and over again during his campaign.

“I’ve been a free enterpriser and a pro-growther,” Roth said in the interview, but in recent years “my concern is that we’ve let growth get ahead of our ability to get people around.

“Maybe transportation might be wagging the tail of development in the future--I don’t know. We need to take a long look at it. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that Don Roth is running around (yelling) ‘stop the whole world.’ ”

A major problem facing Roth in his own district is the Board of Supervisors’ decision last March, over the strong objections of Clark, to build a new jail near Anaheim Stadium.

“I think the philosophy is not that we don’t need jails,” Roth said. “We just don’t need them in urban areas. We need them in remote sites.”

Roth was a leader of the opposition to the jail site. Now, as a member of the board, he finds himself on the other side of a lawsuit filed by the City of Anaheim in an attempt to block the plan.

Surprisingly absent during his long months of campaigning and frequent public appearances in the fall were Roth’s periodic battles with the finer points of the English language.

Although he did say after the election that the small voter turnout was “a sad complimentary” on things, when he meant “commentary,” his speeches were generally free from the malapropisms that had caused one county employee to predict that Roth would be “the Norm Crosby of county government.”

The campaign itself turned out to be a bruising, bitter battle, with barrages of negative political mail from both sides. Beam and Roth started off by calling themselves friends. By Election Day they weren’t talking to each other.

Roth was especially angry over Beam campaign’s distribution of a letter to a federal judge from Richard Raymond Keith. The letter claimed that Roth had had the use of a Palm Springs-area condominium provided by former Orange County fireworks manufacturer W. Patrick Moriarty.

Roth heatedly denied the claim.

Keith is serving a four-year sentence at the federal prison in Boron for tax evasion, bankruptcy fraud and making false statements on loan applications. Moriarty is serving a seven-year federal prison term after pleading guilty in 1985 to laundering contributions to politicians, fraud and bribing public officials.

Last week, Roth was able to joke about spending New Year’s weekend with his wife, Jackie, in Palm Springs, noting that he was staying with friends there and not in a condominium provided by Moriarty.

He also noted that “three generations of the Roth family will be present” for his swearing-in Monday, with his 92-year-old father journeying from San Dimas to join Roth’s sons Randall and Scott. A daughter, Patti, teaches school in Ohio.