County Layoffs Don’t Do the Job; Tax Hike May Be Only Way Out

Well, well, well. Methinks he dost protest too much!

Supervisor (Roger R.) Stanton has been really quick to attack and lop off the heads of county employees. Why? Obviously to diffuse the fact that he and his chief aide accepted “donations” from bond salespeople. I am also curious to know if (Robert L.) Richardson (Stanton’s top aide and a Santa Ana councilman) collected these “donations” to finance his City Council campaign or to supplement his county salary. What a joke!

Additionally, Stanton is as guilty as the other board members by refusing to address the real issue. The only way out of this mess is a tax hike. I don’t want to pay it, my friends and neighbors don’t want to pay it, but there is no other fair and equitable answer. Trying to make county employees shoulder the majority of hits is neither just nor honorable.

ROBERT E. WINBIGLER

Santa Ana

* Our supervisors insist that they will not consider raising taxes, in spite of advice to the contrary from many corners. Supervisor (Jim) Silva says, “That’s the easy way out.” Great! Who wants to take the hard way? He says there are “other things that should be looked at.” Well, what are they?

Six weeks of almost daily meetings (most closed to the public) and our supervisors have yet to come up with a plan. They demoted County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider because he couldn’t come up with anything. Given the political and legal constraints put on him, it is no wonder. No taxes. No state or federal bailout. Just cut, cut and cut. And, oh yes, sell off our assets and import garbage. Way to go, supes!

PAULA SKEEN

Fullerton

* Ultimately, the responsibility for this financial disaster rests on the shoulders of all of us, the citizens of Orange County. We all elected Bob Citron and the Board of Supervisors and we all should pay for the mess our representatives have made.

Connie Haddad and Jean Askhan are right on when they suggest that the public may be mature enough to choose a tax increase to protect county services and jobs rather than retreat into the Dark Ages of civil maturity (“Supervisors Must Put Faith in Wisdom of Electorate,” Jan. 24). At the very least, the Board of Supervisors should seek widespread citizen input before making any decisions. Hopefully, this crisis in leadership has humbled them that much.

DALE W. O’NEAL

Laguna Beach

* Instead of drastically cutting basic services and laying off employees, thereby undermining its infrastructure, the county should look into more innovative ways to raise funds from private citizens. One approach may be through selling the rights to rename some of its streets, buildings, parks and even the airport to its residents. By doing so, the county may well be able to get by without actually forfeiting its ownership on some of its more desirable possessions.

Since our airport and even the Costa Mesa Freeway have already been renamed without creating too much confusion, renaming some of the aforementioned should not pose too much of a problem. Citron Street in the city of Anaheim should certainly be the first item on the menu.

JOHN T. CHIU

Corona del Mar

* I Appreciated “All Should Share In The Pain” (editorial, Jan. 20). I have been saying, from the beginning, that the supervisors were not doing their job. Their pay should be cut and their “perks” taken away and it should be retroactive to the time this “mess” with Citron and the county started. The supervisors should stop their “I didn’t know” and straighten out the disaster they permitted to occur.

LUELLA WULFF

Santa Ana

* In my opinion, the coverage in the L.A Times of the Orange County bankruptcy and the recommendations of state Sen. Tom Hayden regarding the role of Merrill Lynch completely misses the point. The 12-month period from October, 1993, to October, 1994, marked the worst time frame in the last 60 years for bonds. In that 12-month time period, long-term bonds declined about 20% in price. Bob Citron was not the only investor to guess wrong on the direction of interest rates. In fact, many investors lost money in bonds in 1994 as interest rates went up instead of continuing to decline as many predicted. Citron’s mistake was to leverage up his bond portfolio, which increased the amount of risk he was taking with public funds.

The key element in the Orange County tragedy is how unaware the Board of Supervisors was in monitoring Citron’s actions. The board abdicated its responsibilities to oversee Citron and by its inaction magnified the resulting portfolio losses. Attempts by The Times and Hayden to uncover a conspiracy are misdirected and focus public attention away from the real issue: lack of understanding by public officials of how the economy functions.

PAUL GUSTAMACCHIO

Seal Beach

* The Times’ opinion that the supervisors should share in the county fiscal trauma is an anemic palliative to what is needed, as is the layoffs of county workers. Since the ratio of workers to population is next to the lowest in the state, layoffs are a sham intended to show that supervisors are doing their jobs.

It is precisely this “no taxes” philosophy that has been the undoing of Orange County. No, what is needed is for supervisors to do what others in like circumstances have done. Loans and sales-tax rate increases are two avenues. These options have not been exercised due to a political cultural philosophy disdainful of the government’s ability to do good for the benefit of the community. Thus, we need supervisors with a different philosophy of government. All laying off county workers does is to show the callousness and shallowness of these individuals.

ED MORGA

Huntington Beach