O.C. Begins Paying Debts to Relieved Vendors : Bankruptcy: But only about 10% of what’s due to 2,000 companies will be mailed in next six weeks.

The checks are finally in the mail and for trucking company owner Dan Ugalde, that means 1995 won’t be written off as a loss.

Ugalde had to wait until Wednesday, however, to find out he really was getting the $100,000 he was owed by Orange County for work his company did before the county declared bankruptcy last year.

The check arrived at the Coronado Street office of Ugalde Trucking Co. Inc. in Wednesday’s mail, “and I was ecstatic,” he said.

The check to Ugalde, and 27 other checks to vendors owed money for certain pre-bankruptcy work, were mailed Monday, said Mary Ann Schulte, chief financial officer for a Santa Ana heavy construction company and the bankruptcy court-appointed vendors representative to the county’s committee of unsecured creditors.

She said an additional batch of checks is scheduled to be sent out this week. In the next six weeks, about $10 million, or just 10% of the $100 million the county owes to more than 2,000 vendors, will be mailed out.

Most of the bills won’t get paid until--and unless--the county successfully emerges from bankruptcy in July with proceeds from a $500-million bond sale it is planning.

Funds to back up the checks being issued in the next few weeks come from several special accounts that had been frozen by the bankruptcy and cannot be used to pay other expenses. A court order in early November unlocked the accounts, which contained state and federal funds for airport, highway and county waste disposal projects.

Ugalde, who started his company 21 years ago, owns a fleet of 40 earth-moving trailers. He finds the business and then hires independent truckers who hook up to his trailers and haul the dirt.

“We paid all the truckers out of our pocket when they did the work” for the county during a 1994 Santa Ana River flood channel improvement project, he said. “They got paid, and we have been sitting with a $100,000 hole in our bank account. That represents our profit for the year, and until now I just never thought we would get it before the end of the year.”