ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : The Same Roth, in or Out of Office

Even in political disgrace, former Supervisor Don R. Roth bears watching. He’s gone from office, but he’s impossible to forget.

Roth’s plea bargain last month on political ethics-law violations turns out to have been as much a point in a continuing story as the end of a political career. Thankfully, he is engaged no longer in making his own life more pleasant seemingly at every turn in public life through the acceptance of gifts, trips, home improvements and stock from local business people. But the questions keep coming in about how he operated while in office. And now, he is even navigating to his own advantage the terms of a court-supervised informal probation agreement.

The alleged “community service” time he agreed to in a plea-bargain arrangement very much warrants careful monitoring.

It was physical labor that the district attorney’s office said it had in mind when it worked out 200 hours of court-ordered community service as part of Roth’s guilty plea. He was supposed to satisfy the requirement by helping the Boys & Girls Club in Anaheim move.

Now, it is apparent just what Roth’s idea of physical labor is: It’s helping organize a golf tournament for the benefit of the club.

The former supervisor logged his first 30 hours on the project last week. The club’s executive director, Michael J. Sofia, says the 200 hours are expected to be completed even before the club begins moving in June or July. Now that’s heavy lifting.

Roth, it turns out, seems to have been looking for loopholes all along, not just out of office but in. After he resigned, a telling interview that his chief of staff had with authorities became public; the gist was that Roth, by “creative” bookkeeping, had intentionally undervalued expensive meals from business people so that he still could vote on their projects.

Meanwhile, throughout the district attorney’s investigation, Roth maintained that any violations of political ethics laws were “technical” and “inadvertent.”

The plea bargain already has been agreed on, but there’s no need to sign off on work yet to be performed. The district attorney’s office is watching, as it should, and is prepared to make the appropriate recommendation to the court.

Roth should roll up his sleeves if he wants to get credit for time on the clock. Otherwise, let him put the golf tournament together on his own time.

If he dodges the spirit of the agreement, let the Municipal Court, under whose supervision he is performing this work, charge him with violating probation.