Long-Awaited Day of Reckoning : Raabe’s 3-year sentence is important message of accountability

The bankruptcy in late 1994 plunged Orange County into shock. When the dust cleared, a host of participants were ready with a full range of explanations for their various roles. What the public rightly wanted from all this was accountability: a reckoning of who was responsible, how they would be punished, and what steps would be taken to ensure that nothing like it happened again.

On Friday, one of the key players, former Assistant Treasurer Matthew R. Raabe, was sentenced to three years, making him the only person sent to prison. Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey said that he wanted to send that message of accountability for those who abused their positions.

Being accountable is as important in the largely invisible world of municipal finance as it is in any other area of government in which citizens entrust important decisions to their elected and appointed representatives. In the aftermath of the collapse of the county’s investment pool, the incredibly complex world of public investments gradually did become known to the ordinary citizen. But through all that was revealed about arcane strategies for investing public dollars, the central importance of trust and truth-telling in democracy still came through. They are values as important for the modern world, with its arcane terminology--consisting of phrases such as “inverse floaters”--as they were in the simpler world of 18th century America.

Countless Orange County residents have suffered because Raabe and his boss, longtime Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron, violated the trust as caretakers of the public’s money. At the heart of that violation was outright deception. It cost others money, reputations and livelihoods. Ironically, Citron spared himself the hard prison time he almost certainly had coming--and instead qualified for a work-release program--because he became open and truthful late in the game, when he faced his day of reckoning with the judicial system. Raabe chose to fight it out, and paid the price.

Others have had much to answer for in their stewardship of the county investment pool. The pain of bankruptcy has been eased somewhat by the onset of a more favorable economy. But the lessons for those entrusted with public funds will remain for many years to come.