Gas Station Owners Aim Protest at Texaco

Holding placards saying “Get Big Oil Out of Our Business,” about 30 angry independent gas station owners protested Texaco Inc.’s treatment of its dealers Thursday at a company-owned Texaco station in Orange.

“Big oil is taking advantage of the little guy,” said Michael Noble, president of the Southern California Service Station Assn., which has 1,200 members in the region. “We feel they’re using the economic downturn as a tool to evict us from our stations.”

A company official called the protest “unfortunate.”

Noble, who owns a Texaco station in Anaheim Hills, alleged that Texaco deliberately undermines dealers by charging unreasonable lease rates and requiring them to pay higher wholesale fuel prices than its company-owned stations.

Since 1978, the number of dealer-operated stations nationwide has shrunk from 9,248 to 1,821, Noble said.

During the same time, the number of company stations increased from 104 to 1,405.

Greg Hardy, a spokesman at Texaco’s regional office in Universal City, denied that the oil company charges its dealers higher prices. He said Texaco understands the dealers’ concerns and is creating programs to help them improve their business.

Texaco, for instance, plans to spend $36 million over the next three years to renovate the stations of its independent dealers, Hardy said. The company is also holding forums to listen to dealer concerns.

Noble said the dealer association has been staging protests periodically during the past year against Texaco and Unocal, informing consumers that company control of the gas station network would lead to monopolistic pricing. The protest drew sympathetic independent dealers from Unocal and Mobil stations.

“All of the big oil companies are hurting the independent dealers,” said Charles Throop, owner of a Unocal station in Fullerton. “It’s a slow cancer on our business.”