Carl Olson
On this Super Bowl Sunday, it’s perhaps altogether fitting that we talk about football.
In this case, political football.
That’s what the Automobile Club of Southern California has become since four members with conservative ties launched an attempt to win seats on its board of directors.
The group--Carl Olson of Woodland Hills, Robin Westmiller of Thousand Oaks, Mark Seidenberg of Laguna Hills and Peter Ford of Beverly Hills--want to use the venerable club’s influential position in Sacramento to lobby for a series of auto-releated tax cuts.
Specifically, they want to abolish California’s vehicle licensing fee, eliminate what they call the double taxation of gasoline and investigate the high price of fuel.
According to the group, a car buyer pays sales tax when the vehicle is purchased, then has to pay more tax every year for the use of it. The double taxation on gasoline and diesel fuel results from sales tax being imposed on top of state and federal excise taxes. And, they say, the recent surge in fuel prices deserves closer investigation.
“These proposals could result in a yearly savings of between $200 and $2,000 per year, depending on a member’s number of vehicles and annual mileage,” according to the group.
They point to the state surplus to make up for the shortfall that would result from the loss of tax revenues.
Olson said the group is protesting “the current board’s unwillingness to honor the club’s own articles of incorporation to promote the interests of motorists through legislation.”
But the auto club fears that if the slate wins, the new board members will use the club’s clout in a way that would tarnish the organization’s nonpartisan history. The four have a “very narrow, slanted political point of view,” according to Thomas McKernan, the club’s chief executive.
“The four opposition candidates, in concert with a specific political faction, will steer the club into partisan public affairs activities that have no place in our organization, which exists to serve all our members regardless of political affiliation,” McKernan said in a letter to club employees.
In fact, the cuts proposed by Olson and his colleagues closely mirror the legislative agenda of state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), a tax-bashing conservative who has already succeeded in reducing the vehicle licensing fee.
Both McClintock and Olson acknowledge knowing each other but deny any involvement with each other’s efforts. However, McClintock is honorary advisor to the California Republican Liberty Caucus, a group that helped collect signatures for the slate. And Westmiller’s husband, William, is immediate past chairman of the caucus.
The Times recently talked with Olson, an accountant and accounting instructor, about his efforts to win election to the Auto Club board.
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Question: Why is your group trying to win seats on the Auto Club board?
Answer: The main reason is to make the Auto Club represent the pro-motorist point of view in public policy.
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Q: They don’t do that now?
A: The three big issues that we have picked, which seem to be no-brainers, are the car tax, the double taxation on gasoline and a for-real investigation on the incredibly high price of gasoline these days. The current board has not done anything, legislatively, to cut the car tax or abolish it, to get rid of the double taxation on gasoline or to conduct any kind of an investigation of the high price of fuel. And so we want to do that.
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Q: Have you presented these issues to the Auto Club board? Have board members ever debated or taken a position on them or have they just ignored you?
A: They have ignored it. Last year, we presented, as individual members, proposed resolutions for the annual meeting on these three subjects. The board chairman refused to put them on the agenda.
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Q: Did he say why?
A: No.
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Q: You claim the current 12 board members have never been elected by the club membership. How does that work?
A: The current bylaws allow the board to nominate anybody they want, four persons every year, and if nobody else qualifies by petition, there’s never an election. They’re just declared to be in office.
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Q: So you solicited signatures to qualify for nomination?
A: They required approximately 1,600 member signatures, which, for four of us, amounted to 400 each. And we did it.
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Q: Your agenda closely reflects that of state Sen. Tom McClintock. Do you have any connection to him?
A: I’ve known Sen. McClintock for maybe 20 years. I’ve donated small amounts to his campaigns. I believe that he’s one of the few people who actually reads budgets and tax bills. Also, he’s a winner. He keeps winning all his elections very handily. And on these particular issues, it’s been something of an inspiration to be able to say, “Hey, you know, there’s someone there that’s thinking the right way.” We do have a little bit of feedback from him.
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Q: But there’s a chicken and egg question here. Have you and your fellow board candidates adopted McClintock’s positions, or did you come to this philosophy independently?
A: I would say independently because our involvement started maybe two to three years ago when this car tax thing first came up. That was when the people of the state of Washington voted overwhelming to get rid of it. And in Virginia, the governor got elected on the issue. That inspired me to call up the Auto Club because I’d never heard the club speak out on these issues. I called the lobbyist in Sacramento and asked them, “What do you think about the car tax and the high price of gasoline?” and they had absolutely no legislative agenda whatsoever on it. That kind of crystallized it.
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Q: Does McClintock support your efforts?
A: It’s more like inspirational and moral support.
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Q: McClintock has been successful in getting the vehicle licensing fee reduced by the state Legislature and has several auto tax-cutting proposals that you support on his legislative agenda. Aren’t you just duplicating his actions? Why does he need your efforts?
A: We need a permanent organization to look out after the interests of the motorists. Sen. McClintock is one minority member of 40 in the Legislature, and obviously, with term limits, we have to build up major support all over Southern California. It can’t just be a one-man band.
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Q: Are you or your slate associated with any kind of political action group? How do you know each other?
A: It’s mostly personal friendships and associations that come from being a civic activist. In organizing this four-member slate, I was looking for people who had some very good credibility about them in terms of their background and their interests and so forth. And second, that they had the time and integrity to serve as board members.
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Q: The club’s chief executive, Thomas McKernan, said that if the club was ever seen as favoring one political ideology over another, or one party over another, it would lose credibility with legislators and its members. How do you respond to that?
A: I don’t see how you can lose credibility by fulfilling your articles of incorporation. That is totally an absurd argument. Actually, it sort of speaks to the failing of the current management.
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Q: Are you and your colleagues Republicans?
A: No. I know for sure one of them isn’t.
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Q: Would it be fair to say that you all share the same political philosophy?
A: Generally speaking. Especially on this issue, we all agree we need to fight to lower taxes and high gas prices. We don’t present ourselves as any one party. You’d be surprised at the people who signed our petition.
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Q: The club has said it successfully pushed the governor to earmark state gas tax revenue for state infrastructure improvements and that it would back an elimination of the tax, along with a vehicle license fee, if transportation projects now supported by those funds were guaranteed a secure funding source. How do you differ from what they’re saying?
A: The club has done nothing whatsoever to push for tax cuts. There’s plenty of money in Sacramento for everything. If they were sincere in what they have said, they would have sponsored legislation that actually called for tax cuts.
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Q: Do you and your fellow candidates have the expertise to run the auto club with all its myriad components, such as travel and insurance?
A: I think all four of us who are running have a tremendous amount of background in one or another area of the auto club’s activities. The club, taken together with its insurance company, is about a $2-billion revenue organization. And it needs some financial oversight. One of our little slogans is that we want to make your Auto Club membership worth more than your dues by getting all these taxes removed.
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Q: Has the club done anything to defeat your slate?
A: The board of directors have been able to spend, I’m guessing, a couple of hundred thousand dollars, so far, to defeat us. The way they are doing it is that they’re able to solicit proxy votes against us with only the names of their board-authorized nominees. They have put all of these forms in every single one of the 70 district offices and mailed them out with membership renewals. They have gone to the auto shows, and they’re handing them out there to campaign against us. In addition, they’ve had meetings with the employees where they’ve, in a sense, told employees, “You are now to campaign against all four.” The campaign’s been going on for about six weeks. We have not heard word one from any of the four other candidates. In all the statements that come from the board, those four candidates apparently have absolutely no opinions on anything, yet apparently support the idea of high taxes and high gas payments.
Bob Rector is opinion page editor of The Times’ San Fernando Valley and Ventura County editions.
