Dim Political Prospects for 3 Supervisors

Their county is fiscally tattered. The normally benign voting public is behaving like an angry mob. Suffice to say, these are not halcyon days for the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

And their political futures don’t appear much brighter. Campaign consultants and contributors alike generally predict electoral doom for the three supervisors who held office last year when Orange County lost $1.7 billion in investments and declared bankruptcy.

Some even suggest that the trio--Board Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez and Supervisors Roger R. Stanton and William G. Steiner--should do the noble thing and resign outright, or at least declare their intent not to run when their terms expire.

Now the supervisors must decide whether to put a half-cent sales tax increase on the ballot, a decision that will anger some constituents no matter what they do. If they put it on the ballot, vocal conservatives who oppose such new levies will be angry. If they reject the idea, many prominent business leaders could turn against them.

“They’re all dear friends, but at this point it doesn’t look good,” said Doy Henley, president of the influential Lincoln Club, which has consistently and generously donated to the supervisors. “It’s like they’re looking into a political grave and they don’t realize it’s their own bodies in there.”

For Vasquez and Stanton in particular, the prospects are not good, politicos contend. They are scheduled to stand for reelection exactly one year from this month, far too soon for the public to easily forget the bad news that has gripped the county for the past three months.

Before the debacle, Stanton had talked privately about seeking higher office, but one consultant likened his chances to former anti-war activist Tom Hayden trying to run in conservative Orange County. Among those mentioned as tough potential opponents for Stanton are former Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young and former Assemblyman Tom Umberg. Both have proven consistently popular in local elections.

Vasquez, who has publicly vowed to run again, has already drawn two announced challengers, including Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Orange).

Campaign consultants say the tactics election foes would use are predictable.

“With direct mail, their opponents are going to make sure those bankruptcy headlines are repeated over and over and over again,” said Eileen Padberg, an Irvine political consultant. “It will be like it just happened yesterday. And they won’t have the financial backing from the business community to overcome the negative. The business community has lost faith in them as well.”

But not everyone has written the supervisors off.

Lois Lundberg, a campaign consultant and former Orange County GOP chairwoman, noted that Steiner, who was in office only about a year when the crisis occurred, has nearly four years to rehabilitate his image before his term expires in 1998.

“The 1996 crop will have considerably more trouble,” Lundberg said. But she still sees a chance Vasquez and Stanton could overcome public ire and fund-raising problems if the county can make a swift and safe recovery from the brink. “They’ll bear some baggage, but what they contribute to getting out of this mess will come into play.”

Still others contend it could come down to the fine details of politics, most notably the quality of opposition candidates and campaigns. Some suggest that both Vasquez and Stanton could survive without contributions from the business sector because they have amassed healthy campaign coffers after years of running for office unopposed.

But the biggest wild card remains the health of the county on election day next year.

“If I had to predict today, I’d say they’re toast,” Henley said. “But from the depths of despair, people can rise to extraordinary things. If we’re able to regenerate ourselves and restructure, who knows?”

Most consultants said they don’t see any threat of recall, arguing that the supervisors’ harshest opponents don’t command the cash or credibility to succeed. The only recall effort launched against any of the supervisors to date targets Stanton.

Nor do most consultants predict that the board’s two newest members--former state Sen. Marian Bergeson and former Huntington Beach Councilman Jim Silva--will face as much public anger as the three who were in office during the December bankruptcy.

Stanton, Vasquez and Steiner did not return telephone calls last week.

The bad publicity surrounding the bankruptcy has changed the circumstances of running for the county’s highest office, giving supervisors notoriety unmatched in the history of Orange County politics.

For years, the Board of Supervisors has operated in relative anonymity, an almost unseen layer of government handling the workaday chores of managing a fast-growing and prosperous county.

The supervisors often ran unopposed on the ballot. Their meetings rarely drew crowds. Without campaign fireworks and with limited media attention, the board was unfamiliar to the general public. A 1992 Times poll, for instance, found that seven of 10 voters didn’t even know who Stanton was. Vasquez fared slightly better, with 58% saying they were unable to register an opinion on him.

All that changed when the county declared the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history Dec. 6.

“This is the first time they’ve really surfaced and had to take punches from all sides,” Lundberg said. “Before this, they were the invisible government.”

With the looming decision about putting a sales-tax increase on the ballot, the board will be facing even more pressure.

“The business community and the Reason Foundation may have conceded that a tax increase is necessary, but the fact is they’re not going to have to face the voters,” Padberg said. “Many voters will be angry, and they’re going to take their anger out against the supervisors.”

Harvey Englander, a Huntington Beach campaign consultant, said the supervisors have been reluctant to raise taxes largely because they are operating in a political mode instead of making the “good government decisions” needed to recover from fiscal disaster.

“Instead of putting the pain of recovery on everyone with a quarter- or half-cent sales tax, they want to lay the brunt of the pain on county employees,” Englander said, referring to plans to lay off 1,040 county workers. “They’re still making political decisions, and that’s hurting our recovery.”

Englander said Stanton and Vasquez should announce that they do not plan to run, an act he contends would free them to make tough, politically unpopular decisions the county needs. He compared the situation to former President Lyndon Johnson announcing he would not seek reelection; after that, the president’s actions weren’t colored by politics.

Questions still remain about how much support the supervisors could get from developers, who have invariably been among the top campaign contributors.

One building industry official said developers are “holding their breath” to see what happens. If the county somehow is on the road to recovery in another year, Stanton and Vasquez still might see big checks flow into their campaign coffers, the official said.

“A lot can happen in a year,” the official said. “But they’ll face an uphill battle.”

The county’s employee labor unions have long supported the supervisors, providing both cash and the volunteers to run campaigns. But the recent events--most notably the supervisors’ multiple rounds of layoffs and the push to privatize county services--have fractured that support.

“Given what’s happened, I don’t know how many folks in the community would be willing to support them,” said Bill Fogarty, executive secretary-treasurer of the Orange County Central Labor Council, which represents about 6,000 county employees, and more than 90,000 workers countywide. “I think they’re going to get sucked down by this.”

But Robert MacLeod, general manager of the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, said he believes there’s a good chance Stanton could withstand a challenge next March. Vasquez, he predicted, could have more trouble against Conroy, who enjoys good name identification in the region and can raise campaign cash.

“I think it’s too early to tell,” he said. “I hope they’re OK.”