ORANGE COUNTY IN BANKRUPTCY : Supervisors Get Surprise Support From Former Critics

The beleaguered Orange County Board of Supervisors, with three of its members under growing pressure from business leaders to resign or agree to forgo reelection, got support Sunday from an unlikely source: several community activists who had earlier urged them to step down.

The latest twist in the increasingly complex drama sparked by the county’s Dec. 6 plunge into bankruptcy followed reports that a cadre of influential business leaders is pushing three supervisors--Gaddi H. Vasquez, Roger R. Stanton and William G. Steiner--to step down or promise not to run again. The three were in office when the county declared bankruptcy.

But leaders of the Committees of Correspondence, a coalition of community organizers, said Sunday they now back the supervisors, angry that the business leaders want to get rid of the three because they refuse to consider tax increases to help bail out the county.

“Who are these people to be demanding that the supervisors raise taxes?” asked Bruce Whitaker, a spokesman for the Committees, a loose-knit coalition of government reformists and anti-tax activists. “For these unelected officials to be doing this, I find it appalling.

“We’ve worked very hard to make sure these supervisors maintain a ‘no new taxes’ posture. Who would think that business leaders, of all people, would be taking this position now?”

The group’s steering committee has called an emergency meeting for tonight to discuss ways to help the supervisors resist pressure from the business leaders, among other issues, added Bill Mello, a leader of the committees.

The Orange County Business Council, which brokered a recent settlement plan offered to participants in the county’s collapsed investment pool and endorsed by the supervisors, discussed ousting the supervisors at a meeting Feb. 6, according to business sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The council’s Special Task Force on Government Finance includes such prominent developers as George Argyros and Anthony Moiso, as well as top business executives from The Times Orange County edition and the Orange County Register.

The increasingly influential council also has said that a tax increase should form part of the solution to rescue the county from its financial crisis--a statement that represents fighting words to the Committees of Correspondence.

Leaders of the group, named after a Revolutionary War organization formed to oppose British taxation, said their objection to the business community’s maneuvers to remove the supervisors is rooted primarily in a fear of new taxes.

“This whole movement is just wrong,” said Mello, a Huntington Beach resident and retired engineer. The developers, he said, “have their own motives because they want a tax increase, but we won’t go along.”

But that is not the only reason for their newfound support for the three targeted supervisors, he and others stressed.

In recent weeks, the supervisors have become more open and responsive to the coalition’s concerns, Mello said, prompting its members to reconsider earlier threats to launch recall efforts against several of the board members.

In addition, said Carole Walters, another coalition leader, “I just do not think that any of these businessmen should be running the county. That should be the role of the people we elected. But nobody voted for these people, nobody put them into office.

“I respect Gaddi (Vasquez), Steiner and Stanton for standing up to (the business leaders) and saying they won’t raise taxes,” added Walters, the president of the Orange Taxpayers Assn.

But Felix Rocha, the leader of the only formal effort to recall a supervisor to date, said he welcomed the business community’s parallel effort. His attempt to yank Stanton from office will go forward in any event, said Rocha, a member of the Orange County Board of Education.

“I think it’s fabulous that the business community can see the reasons we need to get these people out of office,” Rocha said.

Steiner, who said Walters called him over the weekend to express her anger at the business leaders, said he was grateful for the group’s support.

“She said they were all pretty ballistic about the business community’s efforts,” the supervisor said.

Stanton and Vasquez could not be reached for comment Sunday.

In other developments Sunday, Orange County’s new interim chief executive officer, William J. Popejoy, spent a busy day holding meetings, consulting with the county’s outside attorneys by telephone, and reading thick sheaves of background material on the county’s financial crisis.

“I feel like a sponge that is getting about half full now; maybe next week I’ll get wrung out,” Popejoy, 56, said cheerfully toward the end of the day. “It’s been a busy, productive day and from my perspective at least, I’m making great progress.”

Ending three weeks of speculation, supervisors chose Popejoy on Friday for the six-month job, which he has taken without pay. Any salary he must receive by law he will return to the county, Popejoy said.

Among his other tasks Sunday, the new CEO said he was reviewing the backgrounds of people he is considering to be his senior assistants and starting to focus on a broad-based community outreach program to help restore public confidence in county government.

“We need to figure out ways to get input from the community, and better outreach to the community to get more information out to them,” he said. “The Board of Supervisors and others are in agreement that there’s been a whole lot of misunderstanding about what’s being done and what’s being considered. We need to change that.”

Popejoy’s selection was applauded in a letter to the supervisors by one of his former competitors for the job, Texas businessman B.J. Rone, who called the choice “a victory for everyone.”