Supervisors Make Their Pay Raise Official

Despite protests from about 30 angry anti-tax demonstrators, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to give itself a 4% pay raise, giving final approval to an action it took last week.

When it takes effect in two months, the hike will raise the salaries of each of the five supervisors to $85,336, an increase of $3,282 a year. The supervisors also approved a plan that in future years will allow them to receive automatic raises in step with other county personnel, but will for the first time cap the board members’ salaries.

The demonstrators--most of whom were part of a fledgling, 700-member organization called the Taxpayers’ Action Network of Orange County--brought placards to the boardroom and some shouted in anger as the supervisors concluded their vote.

“You’ll need the raise because you’ll be unemployed soon,” one yelled as the protesters filed from the boardroom. Others echoed that sentiment and complained that the supervisors had ignored them.

“It’s not as if they had to slam this through today,” said Ray Harbour, the network’s spokesman. “We made a request, and they didn’t even consider it. They just went right ahead.”

Representatives of the organization had asked the supervisors to rescind the 4% increase tentatively approved last week and instead take a 10% cut “as a sign of good faith.”

Protesters said the raise was especially inappropriate now, since the supervisors just completed a bruising budget process that included the first layoffs of county workers since 1978.

Supervisors eliminated about 260 positions during that process. But new spots were found for most of the affected employees, and fewer than 20 county workers were laid off.

In addition, the demonstrators lambasted the board for the way in which it enacted the increase during its vote last week. Some opponents of the raise suggested that the board had tried to minimize debate over the issue by acting on it with little public discussion or notice.

But Board of Supervisors Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez said: “This was not, as some have suggested, a sneaky, covert action.” He added that the increase had come at the end of “a legitimate process, a public process.”

The raises approved by the supervisors match hikes given to rank-and-file county workers as well as top elected and appointed officials. After this year, the supervisors will also receive a raise equal to the average of the increases given their top managers in the previous year; the supervisors’ salaries, however, will be capped at the amount being received by Municipal judges, which is now $90,680.

Vasquez and other board members defended the increase--noting, for instance, that the supervisors closed a $67.7-million shortfall this year by axing government services, not by raising taxes.

“I have never voted to raise your taxes to balance the budget,” Vasquez said, adding that the supervisors have built a new airport terminal and added hundreds of jail beds even while rejecting proposals to hike business license and utility fees.

“Look at the record,” Vasquez said. “Judge this board by performance.”

But the supervisors got little sympathy from the protesters.

Lorenzo Quintana of Orange called the raise “unconscionable,” and said it was a move he would expect of Democrats, not Republicans.

“I hope you see that the people are saying to you: Enough is enough,” added Richard Boddie, a Huntington Beach resident and Libertarian candidate for the U.S. Senate.

And Tim Miller, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told board members that the custodial workers who make up the union were “totally against the pay raises.”

Miller said he valued his relationship with Supervisor Roger R. Stanton. As for the rest, he added: “I’m going to make your lives miserable.”

After hearing testimony from more than a dozen opponents of the pay hike, the supervisors unanimously approved it.

Members of the group were seething in anger at the end of the session, and many vowed political revenge.

“I’m going to be running against Roger Stanton this year,” Wayman Nelson, one of the demonstrators, said after the meeting. “This is going to be a big issue.”

Others threatened to back recall campaigns or to push for term limits for the County Board of Supervisors. One man said he hoped to launch a campaign to have the salary for any elected office printed next to the candidates’ names when they ran for office. The officials would then be bound to live with that salary.

Despite those suggestions, however, Harbour said the network did not yet have a formal plan for reacting to the pay raises. The organization’s seven-member executive committee expects to meet over the weekend and will probably come up with a plan of action, Harbour said.

Reacting to the angry crowd, supervisors said many of the protesters were relying on information published last week in the Orange County Register. The paper’s report said the board acted “with no public discussion and very little public notice.”

“If I had solely and exclusively read the story that appeared in the Orange County Register . . . and had read the way the story was portrayed and characterized, I would be upset,” Vasquez said.

Holding up a copy of the Los Angeles Times Orange County Edition, Vasquez noted that the paper--in a front-page item published five days before the matter was voted on by the board--had reported on the impending salary vote and predicted that the supervisors would approve a 4% hike.

The Register reporter who wrote the article said later that he stood by his story. Editors at the paper declined comment.

For the young anti-tax network, Tuesday marked a legislative coming of age. The Orange County chapter, based in Fountain Valley, has has been in existence only a few months, and until the pay raise issue surfaced, it had kept a low profile on county government issues.

Formed in July, the taxpayer network at first attracted just a handful of supporters. But its leaders say it has grown by bounds, spurred mostly by anger over the tax hikes that Gov. Pete Wilson and the state Legislature approved to balance the state budget.

Harbour, for instance, said the state tax hikes prompted him to form what he called the “Ding Dong Tax Revolt Committee.” To protest the state snack tax, Harbour and his group sent Wilson 1,000 Hostess Ding Dongs, delivering them in crates to the governor’s reception area.

Supporters of that effort have joined with others under the new network, and now that group boasts about 700 local members, according to Harbour and others.

And though small in size, Tuesday’s crowd of demonstrators drew from a variety of backgrounds: It included people who described themselves as Libertarians and others who called themselves Republicans; most were older, longtime county residents, but a few were more recent arrivals; South County and North County were represented; there were men and women in relatively equal numbers, and the group was racially mixed.

“We’ve got a bunch of people you might call rookies,” Harbour said. “But we’re mad as hell.”

Moreover, the group has some powerful backing. At an Oct. 19 rally in Santa Ana, W.R. Grace and Co. Chairman Peter Grace, a nationally known opponent of government waste, made an appearance, as did several local conservative politicians.

“It’s very soon to pass judgment on their effectiveness,” Nicholas Thimmesch II, campaign director for conservative U.S. Senate hopeful Bruce Herschensohn, said of the network. “But they have a very good issue. If it catches on, they could be a major force statewide.”