ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : He Must Be Persuaded to Go

The situation looks increasingly serious for Orange County Supervisor Don R. Roth. The district attorney’s office now has laid out, in a detailed affidavit seeking access to banking records, its suspicions that Roth has engaged in perjury, theft of public funds, campaign money laundering, obstruction of justice and possibly other felonies.

These are only suspicions, of course, not proven charges. But the list alone makes it abundantly clear, as we have said repeatedly, that Roth should no longer be in office. It’s time for board colleagues, Orange County political leaders and constituents to persuade him to step aside in the public interest. His credibility as a public official has shrunk to a very low point.

While many of the accusations were public knowledge, one was new: that Roth falsified a home loan application by claiming monthly income of $4,000 in what were described as “consulting fees.” The fees were not reflected in state or federal records.

Roth will have to answer for this. If he earned such income and didn’t report it, he’s in trouble with tax authorities and may have violated financial disclosure laws for politicians. If he didn’t have the income, he has to answer charges that he falsified loan documents.

The public has been held in suspense long enough. The district attorney must move speedily to conclude the investigation so that the Board of Supervisors can get beyond this distraction.

By signaling that Roth could face prosecution, the district attorney has opened the possibility that the supervisor, if convicted, eventually could be removed from office. But residents of the 4th District deserve a representative now who can devote energy to the county’s pressing problems. What they have instead is a representative too consumed with his own problems to serve them at all.