ORANGE COUNTY IN BANKRUPTCY : Some Welcome for the New Supervisors : Politics: County plunges into abyss just before Bergeson and Silva join board. It’s not quite what they had in mind.

Marian Bergeson looked forward to leaving a distinguished career in the state Senate to return home as an Orange County supervisor, believing “local government is where the action will be.” Little did she know the prophecy in those words.

“At the time, I also complained of Orange County as being in a media vacuum,” the 69-year-old veteran of local and state politics, who was elected to the Board of Supervisors just last month, said wryly Thursday. “Now, I’d be oh so happy if O.J. (Simpson) would reacquire his rightful place on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.”

Bergeson has been stunned by the international attention. When she wasn’t looking at a stack of East Coast dailies that had Orange County’s woes splashed across Page One, or listening to news of the crisis over the BBC, she was trying to figure out what to do.

She and former Huntington Beach City Councilman Jim Silva will officially join the board on Jan. 5, encountering a much different mission and mood than either had ever imagined. It will be as much a job of national image repair, Bergeson said, as it will trying to figure out how to recover from, of all things, bankruptcy.

“Everyone has been caught totally off guard,” she said. “The news was shocking . . . just shocking. I’ve always enjoyed challenges, but this is one that’s really grabbed me by the throat.”

Silva, 50, who could not be reached for comment Thursday, spent 28 years as an Orange County schoolteacher, and his expertise should come in handy. His subject was economics.

He won election after an expensive and bitter campaign against Democratic Huntington Beach Mayor Linda Moulton Patterson, who opened one typically stormy debate by presenting Silva with a plaque for being the “worst politician in Orange County.”

A 16-year member of state government, with six years in the state Assembly and now a decade in the Senate, Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) said she perceived her role of supervisor-elect as being able to do “everything I could” with contacts and expertise in Sacramento.

She acknowledged playing a role, for instance, in Orange County appointing a new treasurer-tax collector, “a real hotshot”--former state Treasurer Thomas W. Hayes--to replace the man being blamed for the calamity, Robert L. Citron, who resigned on Sunday.

Both Bergeson and Silva agree, as do the current supervisors, that Orange County’s biggest sin was not having oversight of the activities of one man in whom unparalleled trust and confidence had been placed.

Silva’s supporters say much of his job will be proving his detractors wrong and showing that he can be valuable in repairing the damage.

As for Bergeson, when she announced her intention to leave state politics earlier this year and return home to Newport Beach as county supervisor, political leaders in both Orange County and Sacramento mourned her departure. But on Thursday, some of the same people were saying her homecoming could not have been better timed.

“The positive things she has going for her aren’t going to be entirely lost up here,” said Dennis Carpenter, a powerful Sacramento lobbyist whose clients include the county of Orange and the Orange County Transportation Authority, which has $1.1 billion invested in the county’s ill-fated portfolio.

Since Bergeson played a critical role in watching after the county’s transportation interests in Sacramento, her supporters say such talents will now be invaluable, since so many millions of dollars from local transportation agencies are tied up in the troubled investment pool.

The woman dubbed “Marian the Librarian” when she first arrived in Sacramento was named in a 1992 Capitol Journal survey as the second most effective Republican in the Senate, right behind GOP leader Ken Maddy (R-Fresno), and fourth in the entire Legislature.

Even her adversaries have heaped praise.

“Sen. Bergeson is as responsible a legislator as we have in our state,” then--state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), longtime Senate Democratic leader, said earlier this year. “Orange County’s gain of a supervisor will be Orange County’s loss in the Capitol.”

Based on her experience in Sacramento and mindful of the current crisis, Bergeson has found herself thinking of Butte, a rural, relatively poor county in Northern California that grappled with insolvency a few years ago, stopping just short of bankruptcy.

“For my background and experience, I’m in the right place at the right time,” she said. “I never thought I’d be involved with something like this on a personal level, but it is a situation that will be corrected. We’ll see our way through this.”

Bergeson’s greatest fear is that the Federal Reserve Board and Chairman Alan Greenspan will once again raise interest rates after six increases this year, including a .75% hike on Nov. 15. It was unexpectedly rising interest rates that devalued the county’s investment portfolio. Another increase of even a half-point could plunge the county into recession, she said.

Incumbent supervisors can’t be blamed for what happened, Bergeson said, noting of Citron: “Because of the huge amounts of money he was making, he was lauded by national organizations for his ‘phenomenal success in investment policy.’ Everyone wanted to be a part of the game. That’s why 180 different agencies wanted to come into the pool.

“They were all looking at great returns. One year, there was a 16% increase (on their investment), but it was all predicated on low interest rates. As soon as high interest rates came in, it was all out of whack. Believe me, this was news to everyone. It came like a bolt out of the blue.”