Roth Has Right to Remain Silent, Obligation to Explain

County Supervisor Don R. Roth must have:

A) An extraordinarily thick skin.

B) An indefensible position.

C) Total disdain for the public.

How else to explain his complete silence over the months on the brewing mini-scandals that, if he can wake up and smell the coffee, threaten to bring down his political career?

I suppose that Roth, who’s in the middle of his second term, could argue that the correct answer is D) None of the above.

He could argue that he’s guilty of nothing and that he can convincingly explain his actions in each case. Maybe he can, but it begs the question:

If he can, why doesn’t he?

I hope you’ve been following this newspaper’s stories about some of Roth’s actions in recent years. I sense that the stories have been a little slow in taking shape in the public’s mind, and that’s too bad, because they get at the heart of what government is all about.

To wit, is Don Roth voting in the public interest or trading on his position?

The original allegations that surfaced against Roth involved personal financial dealings with political supporters who, as it turns out, also had business before the county board. My guess is that the public may have seen the issue as suspicious, at best. That Roth subsequently got caught in apparent inconsistencies in retelling the incident should have added to the suspicion, but it wasn’t the kind of high-profile issue that the public could sink its teeth into.

However, they may have an easier time with the latest disclosure, which surfaced Sunday in this newspaper. The Wall Street investment firm of First Boston Corp. gave Roth and his then-wife $2,500 in 1987 for a weekend trip to New York, four months after Roth had voted to give the company a major role in Orange County’s jail financing plans. Roth later listed the contribution as payment for giving a “speech at First Boston seminar.”

That alone should have made someone suspicious.

Don Roth giving a speech at a Wall Street seminar? The same Roth who regularly amuses spectators with his use of the language, including such time-honored slips as his reference to the possibility of “Russian deflectors” at the 1984 Olympics?

Funny, maybe, but here’s the serious part. Now we know that Roth gave no speech at all. Rather, according to First Boston officials interviewed for the article that appeared Sunday, Roth merely met privately with company executives to discuss their possible involvement in Orange County. In a letter to Roth, a First Boston official, apparently feeling the need to fudge things, wrote:

“Rather than directly paying for your expenses in connection with the trip to New York, we would propose to pay an honorarium of $2,500 in consideration for your participation in our seminar. I trust that this amount will be sufficient to offset most, if not all, of your related expenses.”

No other Orange County supervisor made the trip. Roth, by the way, was barely into his first few months in office when invited to New York by First Boston.

All by itself, the New York weekend looks bad. What followed looks even worse in hindsight.

The 1980s were marked by the county’s ongoing problems with expanding its jail system. In August of 1989, Roth formally proposed an alternative to a local jail--building a regional jail 165 miles from Santa Ana in the Riverside desert.

While Sheriff Brad Gates and others dismissed the remote jail site idea as folly, Roth championed it and had the county staff look into the idea, which it did before effectively scuttling the idea late in 1990 as costing around $1 billion more to operate over 30 years than a local site.

Under normal circumstances, Roth’s endorsement of the remote site idea wouldn’t have to be viewed so suspiciously. From time to time, public officials rightly send up trial balloons or go against conventional wisdom.

But now, in the context of Roth’s dealings with First Boston, everything takes on a whole new look. Now we know that First Boston, eager to get into the jail-financing market and with business already going in Riverside County, originally proposed the desert-site idea to Roth.

Now, instead of a trial balloon, it looks like a supervisor spending county resources on an idea that he may or may not have supported but forwarded as a favor to a former benefactor.

Sorry, supervisor, that’s how it looks.

Maybe there’s a perfectly logical explanation for everything.

If so, we’d like to hear it.

Roth declined comment on the most recent story. He has said nothing about the original story involving his personal finances and political supporters since April, when he said: “I wasn’t trying to hide anything. There was no intent to circumvent the law. To try to paint me as a dishonest guy, to me that is ridiculous.”

The latest disclosures demand that Roth, as one of the most visible officeholders in Orange County, needs to speak out, muddled syntax be damned.

Otherwise, it suggests the answer to the question posed at the top of this column is, unfortunately, E) All of the above.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.