Group Behind Suit Has Revolutionary Air

Steve White said he was just trying to return “a little constitutionality” to Orange County.

That’s why the Anaheim real estate agent sued the county Wednesday, challenging the diversion of transportation and other funds that enabled the county to emerge from bankruptcy last summer.

White is the chairman of a steering committee of the Committees of Correspondence, a loose-knit confederation of Orange County activists and anti-tax groups formed in the Huntington Beach living room of its late founder, Bill Mello.

“We like to think of ourselves as throwbacks to [the era of] John Adams, when the group from which we took our name used to raise hell,” said Robert Ault, a group member from Westminster.

By pressing the lawsuit, White said, the Committees of Correspondence is reinforcing its basic message: Orange County government is far too large and much too unaccountable.

White believes the bankruptcy bailout siphoned taxpayers money unconstitutionally. Some $570 million is being taken from transportation funds, along with another $240 million from county programs for flood control, redevelopment and harbors, beaches and parks.

“The whole bankruptcy bailout plan was contingent upon the shuffling funds and we’d like to hold those who were responsible to task,” White said. “We don’t believe anyone has been held accountable except [former Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L.] Citron.”

“The bottom line is, the taxpayers deserve some changes out of all of this and very little has happened,” White said of the bankruptcy’s aftermath.

White became an activist representing Anaheim HOME, a homeowners organization and the largest group within the larger Committees of Correspondence.

The committees came together in December 1994, just months after the county filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. Its members quickly became ubiquitous critics of what they saw as runaway government spending and the unchecked political power that led to $1.64 billion in losses in the county-run investment pool.

The coalition can mobilize thousands of county residents from membership rosters of its various member organizations. It demonstrated both its reach and its disgust with local officials in June 1995, when top county officials and financial advisors asked voters to approve Measure R, a half-cent sales tax increase that would have raised $130 million a year for 10 years.

“During this bankruptcy we tried to warn the Board of Supervisors they were getting farther away from the public, wasting taxpayer money, and that if they went ahead with Measure R we would scuttle it,” Alt said.

And they did, defeating the tax hike, estimated at the time to be $50 for every man, woman and child in Orange County. It went down by a 3-2 ratio.

Alt, 66, who retired in 1994 as plant manager of a Fullerton fastener manufacturer, said that he and others in the group were appalled by the bankruptcy.

“It put a big bright light on something that had been going on in Orange County for a while and shame on us for not being aware of it,” he said. “The deeper I dug the more disgusted I got, so I thought, I’ll join this group of people trying to do something about it.”

If the lawsuit succeeds, the county may have to restore the diverted funds and find new sources of revenue. That could mean deep and painful cuts of county services and jobs.

“We’re not trying to upset the apple cart, but we are trying to force the supervisors to step up to the plate and do some of things they promised to do,” Alt said. “We’re back to tax and spend as usual. It’s like there’s never been a bankruptcy.”