Roth Can’t Make It to Rally : Community: Organizers of the large anti-drug event are upset, saying the supervisor is standing them up. But Roth says he never promised to show.

To the dismay of church and community leaders, County Supervisor Don R. Roth said he will not attend a large anti-drug rally planned Monday at Century High School, even though the organizers already had announced that he would lead the meeting.

Roth chalked it up to a “communications confusion” and said he never promised to attend in the first place.

The Orange County Congregation-Community Organizations, a coalition of 17 churches with 40,000 member families, expects to draw 3,000 people to the high school auditorium at 7:30 p.m. Monday to call for more aggressive action on the war on drugs.

The organization has held similar, though smaller, rallies in the past year with other elected officials.

But in a letter mailed to the organization this week, Roth said: “Unfortunately, the short three-week notice and the communications confusion makes it impossible for me to accept. I would, however, like to support your community action effort to combat drug abuse in our communities.”

Organizers of the event, however, insist that Roth had made a firm commitment to attend the meeting, and they are upset that he refused to return their telephone calls Thursday to discuss the matter.

“Basically, we wanted him there because he’s the top elected official in the county, and what we want from him is leadership,” said Raquel Estrada, a member of the organization who belongs to St. Boniface Church in Anaheim.

In an interview Thursday, Roth said organizers must have misunderstood early discussions they held with him and his aide a few weeks ago.

“I never agreed to go to the meeting,” Roth said. When talks about the meeting began, Roth said he asked the organizers for more information “on who you are, what you are and what kind of a meeting this is going to be.”

He said the group told his aide it would be a meeting of 15 people. It wasn’t until this week, Roth said, that he learned that the group has been billing the meeting as a much bigger affair.

“They said they would provide us with the agenda and the questions,” he said. “They did none of that. The next thing I know there is widespread publicity . . . about 3,000 people there and they wanted to put me on the spot that I’m supposed to cure all the drug problems.”

But organizers say the meeting is intended to build a relationship with Roth, not to confront the supervisor.

“No one is planning to humiliate anyone,” said Sister Carmen Sarati of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Santa Ana, one of the organizers.

Others said that Father John Lenahan, one of the group’s leaders, first told Roth about the meeting on May 2. On May 16, a delegation from the organization went to Roth’s office. Members of the delegation said the supervisor told them that he would attend but that they were to work out the details with his staff.

Organizers also said they are baffled that Roth wanted more information on their organization, which has been in existence six years here and has held several widely publicized meetings with other county leaders in the last year.

For example, in April, 1989, a charged crowd of 1,200 packed an Anaheim auditorium in a meeting with the mayors of Anaheim and Santa Ana and won commitments from the two politicians to do more about the drug problem.

As a result, both cities adopted resolutions to wage a more aggressive fight on drugs. Later, the County Board of Supervisors passed a similar resolution.

Andy Saavedra, another member of the congregation group, said that perhaps Roth was nervous about the large number of people expected at Monday’s meeting.

He also said that perhaps Roth thinks the organization is a “radical” group.

“Maybe it’s because when we went to the supervisor’s meeting we came in singing a song,” he said. “Maybe he thinks we’re a bunch of crazies.”

The song they were singing, he said, was “Kumbaya,” a popular church song.