Residents Can’t Seem to Picture O.C. Bankrupt

It seemed unimaginable at first, like some ridiculous joke, but as news spread that prosperous Orange County had somehow gone bankrupt, dazed taxpayers who didn’t know a bond from a burger definitely weren’t laughing.

“I’m pretty amazed,” said Debbie Fields, a 42-year-old planner from Irvine. “I feel speechless. I don’t know what to think.”

At Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza, Christmas shoppers were beyond shocked. Many in the vaunted cathedral of consumerism called Orange County the last place one expects a billion-dollar-plus financial calamity.

“I always thought of Orange County as the last bastion of wealth and the American way,” said Cameron Pylant, 32, manager of a men’s clothing store in the mall. “I’m shocked.”

Herbert Adler, 61, felt victimized.

“What happened to all the taxes I’ve been paying all these years?” he said.

But he was the exception. For most, the crisis was anything but personal. So complex are the issues, so delicate the web of loans and debts, few could predict the concrete consequences within their own lives.

“I have no idea how it will affect me,” said Karen Darney, 44, of Santa Ana Heights.

Shopping with her 3-year-old son in a Santa Ana 98-cent store, Norma Juarez, 25 and unemployed, knew she would pay, but didn’t know how.

“The economy will just keep going down,” she said. “There are no jobs. No future. There are a lot of layoffs. This will make it harder. . . . I want a better future for me and my son. This will make it harder.”

Early in the day, before the bankruptcy filing was reported, the mood was less angry, more dazed. The county seemed like one big high school math class, and the deepening financial crisis marked the dreaded start of calculus.

“I’m one of those people that doesn’t have a clue,” said Laura Conkey, 28, a waitress at Pop’s Cafe in Santa Ana, where $2.99 gets you a chili dog with fries and the only percent people care about is 15%, as in the tip.

The fact that the public kitty may be $1.5 billion lighter because of various investment strategies was more difficult to digest than a heavy lunch.

“Like usual,” Conkey said, reprising a familiar refrain around Pop’s crowded counter, “the bureaucrats were spending our money and not thinking about where it was going.”

Conkey wasn’t sure how Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron, who resigned Monday, actually spent her money. Nor was lawyer Marc Levine, who hunched over his $4 hamburger and pleaded that Calvin and Hobbes are more accessible than Citron and bonds.

One thing Westminster resident Jim Owen wanted was to raise his hand and ask someone why the county’s shortfall is dismissed by several experts as a “paper loss.”

“I’m confused by the whole thing,” Owen said. “I’ve read in the paper that it’s only a paper loss, but now I’m hearing that the county may file bankruptcy. What happened to the paper loss? How can it be a paper loss if there’s $1.5 billion missing?”

Good question, and one they would have happily answered at Pop’s corner table, where five silver-haired masons enjoyed a heaping portion of hindsight during their traditional Tuesday lunch.

“Somebody’s always pulling something sooner or later,” said Glenn Kirk, 81, a retiree from Anaheim.

His fellow masons nodded gravely. Such is human nature. More puzzling to them was that all this loot wasn’t watched by more county officials--like the lunch check that sat in the middle of their little group, for instance, which they watched as if it were a coiled snake.

On a $25 bill, the men voted to leave their favorite waitress a 30% tip, prompting 66-year-old Dean Bradley to mutter, “We act sometimes like we work for the county.”

“All I know is that people who seem to be in positions of power are abusing it,” said Lesley Renvoize, a nanny from Laguna Beach who was feeding her 8-month-old charge in Newport’s Fashion Island.

Maybe it wasn’t the math but the vocabulary that made people feel so dumb. “Derivatives” and “reverse repurchase agreements”--financial phrases bandied about to describe Citron investment strategy--fell on people’s ears like Swahili poetry.

“That’s just a bunch of fancy words,” said Nazario Negrete, 45, a Fullerton maintenance worker studying the business section of the newspaper. “It’s hard to understand.”

“But one thing I do know,” he added. “It looks bad for Orange County.”

Jim Berkey was one of the lucky ones who got it.

An electrician from Lake Forest, Berkey was polishing off a man-sized meal and telling two friends--Ray Scrivner of Placentia and David Lawhorn of Anaheim--how the county is wired. Fiscally speaking.

“It’s all on paper,” said Berkey, whose bushy mustache complemented his bristly oratory style. “Ain’t no money lost. Yet. All right? But from what I understand, the budget is based on what’s on paper.”