O.C. Supervisor Vasquez Faces Recall Attempt

Board of Supervisors Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez, who announced last month that he will not seek reelection, was served with recall papers Wednesday by a group of Fullerton anti-tax activists.

The group’s leaders, W. Snow Hume, a Fullerton accountant, and Stuart Stitch, a political campaign consultant, said they hope to remove the veteran supervisor because of their continuing outrage over the county’s devastating bankruptcy and anger at Vasquez’s decision to support Measure R, last month’s ill-fated bankruptcy recovery tax.

Vasquez, 40, was served with the documents--the first official step in a recall movement--as he attended a Chapman University forum Wednesday aimed at exploring solutions to the county’s financial woes and involving residents in the recovery process.

The supervisor said he was disappointed at the effort, especially in light of his announcement last month that he would not seek another term.

“I think it’s an unfortunate waste of the taxpayers’ money,” said Vasquez, the most prominent county official who has said he will leave office in the midst of the county’s financial debacle.

Vasquez, Orange County’s highest-ranking Latino officeholder, also said he was unhappy that the group chose to serve him on a day when he and his colleagues were trying to help people feel involved through their “Financial Recovery Roundtable” session.

“The fact that they chose to do it on this day when we are talking about coming together to identify strategic solutions and ideas is unfortunate,” Vasquez said. “There are those who want to just prolong the turmoil as opposed to working through a recovery that will put this behind us.”

But the recall proponents said they selected the location intentionally in order to underline their belief that removing Vasquez from office would help speed the county’s recovery.

“We wanted to make that point by doing it there,” said Hume, a frequent critic of county leaders since the December bankruptcy.

Vasquez, who has about $300,000 in his political war chest, declined to state Wednesday whether he would fight the recall if its supporters succeeded in gathering enough signatures to qualify it for the ballot. More than 25,600 signatures of registered voters in the 3rd District must be collected and verified for the recall attempt, according to a spokeswoman for the county’s registrar of voters.

Vasquez, who said he will not seek another term because he wants to spend more time with family and friends, also said the timing of the effort makes no sense. He noted that several candidates have already started gearing up for next March’s primary election to determine who will succeed him. His term runs through next year.

“This is a distraction that comes at a very critical time,” he said. “My view is that I need to focus on the issues at hand.”

Others, including political analysts and at least one leader of the anti-tax Committees of Correspondence, also questioned the group’s timing.

“Gaddi Vasquez has already announced his resignation. He is basically at the end of his term,” UC Irvine Professor Mark Baldassare said. “It seems pointless to mount a recall on a supervisor who is on the way out.”

“I don’t see why they’re doing it now,” added Carole Walters, a leader of the Committees of Correspondence, who said her group was not supporting the effort.

“We’re not a part of this,” Walters said. “We’re willing to give [the supervisors] a chance to see what they can do now.”

Harvey Englander, a veteran political consultant in the county, characterized “these people using recalls [as] ridiculous. They’re wasting time, energy and money.”

Until Wednesday, Roger R. Stanton was the only supervisor of the three in office at the time of the bankruptcy to have faced a recall effort. That attempt failed for lack of signatures.

Leaders of the new effort described their motivations as a list of “three strikes” against Vasquez, who has served on the board for the past eight years.

The first, they said, involved what they called the supervisor’s failure to “publicly oppose” the activities of former County Treasurer Robert L. Citron, whose risky investment strategy led to the loss of $1.7 billion in the county’s investment pool and precipitated the county’s bankruptcy.

The second reason involved Vasquez’s decision to support Measure R, the failed June 27 ballot initiative to raise the county’s sales tax rate by half a cent, the group said. Finally, they said, they disagreed with the supervisor’s vote in February to approve a settlement agreement between the county and the cities, school districts and other agencies that had invested in the county’s collapsed pool.

In addition, Hume said, “Gaddi has essentially used every trick and ruse to cut off our input” into the county’s recovery process. For example, Hume said that at Board of Supervisors’ meetings, he is often scheduled to address the board near the end of the public session, “after the TV cameras are gone.”

“The whole process by which [Vasquez] operates essentially is by not engaging learned members of the reform community” in the county’s recovery, Hume said.

Both he and Stitch said they decided to press their recall attempt against Vasquez because they do not believe the supervisor will stick to his decision not to seek another term.

“He changed his mind on taxes. Why in the world should we expect him not to change his mind on this?” Hume asked.

The notice was signed by 22 Fullerton residents, including two--Hume and Tom Babcock--who led the successful 1994 recall of three members of the Fullerton City Council after they had approved a controversial utility tax in that city.

Vasquez refused to discuss the members of the group seeking his ouster. “I’m going to leave it up to lawyers to deal with that,” he said.

Asked if he planned any legal action in response to the recall effort, Vasquez said: “I’m not saying anything on that front.”

* CITIES IN A STATE: O.C. cities, squeezed by county, plead their case in Capitol. A3

* RESIDENTS’ SOLUTIONS: Public ideas on recovery range from farsighted to far-out. A3