Roth Repays His Campaign Fund $2,679 for ’90 Trip : Reimbursement: The supervisor’s lawyer said both the fund and an agency had been billed for the Europe excursion.

Orange County Supervisor Don R. Roth has reimbursed his own campaign fund nearly $2,700 for a trip to Europe that his lawyer acknowledged for the first time Friday was double-billed to both the campaign and a public agency.

The reimbursement is reflected in a state-required statement that Roth will file with the county at the end of this month, disclosing recent contributions and expenditures in his campaign account, officials said.

“That will be in the campaign report,” said Jane Willet, a bookkeeper for the Roth campaign. “It becomes public at that time.”

The apparent double-billing is one of a host of allegations under investigation by the district attorney’s office, which is seeking to determine whether Roth traded political favors for meals, trips, landscaping, home improvements, an $8,500 interest-free loan and a number of other unreported gifts from people with business before the County Board of Supervisors.

Roth has denied wrongdoing and has vowed he will be exonerated.

Roth’s attorney, Dana Reed, would not discuss the contents of the supervisor’s upcoming campaign report, but he did confirm on Friday that Roth reimbursed his account on July 20, soon after the apparent double-billing was first disclosed in The Times.

The former Anaheim mayor reported having spent nearly $2,900 in campaign funds for a trip to Europe in March, 1990, even though his travel for that same trip had already been paid by the taxpayer-funded California-Nevada Super Speed Train Commission, on which he served.

Roth, who has championed the idea of building a high-speed rail between Anaheim and Las Vegas, led a delegation of private business people from Orange County to view train technology in West Germany and France.

“Don Roth paid, or refunded is the more accurate term, the sum of $2,679 to the campaign fund,” Reed said in an interview. “Once it came to his attention that there was an error of some sort, he reimbursed the committee. . . . Obviously, (the error) was not intentional.”

Roth originally reported spending $2,879 from his campaign on travel for the trip, but Reed said other legitimate trip expenses billed to the campaign accounted for the $200 difference between that total and the reimbursement. He said he did not have details on what those other expenses were.

Asked whether he believed the reimbursement might absolve Roth of any legal liability from his use of the campaign funds, Reed said: “I don’t know.”

The lawyer added that while state law bans politicians from using campaign funds for personal use, Roth “certainly didn’t do it knowingly.”

Roth, who has declined to comment on the investigation, never offered an explanation for the billing discrepancy at the time it was first disclosed last July. Reed’s comments Friday were the first acknowledgment from the supervisor’s camp that he had collected money to which he was not entitled.

Reed said he thought that the billing error was probably the result of confusion over payment for the airplane ticket used by Roth’s then-wife, Jackie. State law allows elected officials to use campaign funds to pay for a spouse to accompany them on political or business trips.

But Jackie Roth flew free because a family friend who arranged the trip gave her a ticket. Reed said the $2,879 may originally have been intended to cover Jackie Roth’s airline ticket.

Apart from its financing, the Europe trip has proven controversial because the Roths also received free upgrades--from business-class to first-class seats--from Lufthansa Airlines. Each upgrade was worth more than $2,200.

Former John Wayne Airport Manager George A. Rebella also told The Times that he arranged at Roth’s request for the supervisor to receive an upgrade free of charge on an earlier trip to Hawaii. The upgrade came from American Airlines, which does business at John Wayne Airport and relies on county supervisors to authorize the number of daily flights it is allowed.

The state Constitution bans government officials from accepting “free passes or discounts” from transportation companies. Violators can be thrown out of office.

Sources have said that when Rebella resigned under pressure as airport chief in 1990, county officials reluctantly yielded to his request for what amounted to more than $28,000 in disputed back pay after he threatened to “blow the whistle” on alleged upgrades by unnamed county officials.