Opponents of Car Taxes Eye Auto Club as Power Base
Your $43 Automobile Club of Southern California membership suddenly entitles you to more than a free tire change and a map of the San Gabriel Valley. Now, at no extra charge, you receive a dollop of partisan politics.
The 100-year-old nonprofit organization is the target of a conservative group attempting to win seats on its board of directors to lobby for auto-related tax cuts.
Four Auto Club members, whose platform is a mirror image of laws proposed by a conservative Republican state legislator, are running as a “reform slate” for the open seats in the March 12 election. Their campaign has created the club’s first contested election in recent memory.
Club officials fear that if the slate wins, the new board members will use the clout of the 5-million-member organization in a way that would tarnish the organization’s long nonpartisan history.
The challengers have “a very narrow, slanted political view,” said Thomas McKernan, chief executive of the Auto Club, the largest AAA affiliate in the country. “If we ever got to the point where we were seen as favoring one party over another, or one political ideology over another, I think we would lose credibility with legislators, and could lose credibility with our members.”
The four candidates--Peter Ford, Carl Olson, Mark Seidenberg and Robin Westmiller--are pushing to abolish California’s vehicle licensing fee, end the 15% sales tax on gasoline and launch an investigation of high gas prices.
The legislator whose name keeps cropping up in the controversy is state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Northridge), an anti-tax crusader and honorary advisor to the California Republican Liberty Caucus, a libertarian-leaning group that helped collect signatures for the slate.
McClintock said he has not had any involvement with the Auto Club slate, but added that he has been disappointed by the club’s recent positions on transportation issues.
“I’ve been very concerned that the Auto Club’s legislative positions have been contrary to what I think the broad membership would want,” McClintock said. “It’s not a liberal-conservative issue--it’s about what’s in the best interest of California motorists.”
Alice Bisnow, the club’s manager of government affairs, said an overt political agenda “would make it harder for us to be heard and to get the votes that we need on the issues we’re pushing.”
The contenders say they have no political agenda and are simply members fed up with the direction of the current 12-member board. Any parallel between their platform and a Republican legislative platform is a coincidence, they added.
“It’s just something that seemed like the right thing to do for the right cause,” said Westmiller, an author and Libertarian who lives in Thousand Oaks, which is part of McClintock’s district. “You don’t have to be a registered Republican to believe in a party platform to take a look and say, ‘This is a great idea.’ It’s ludicrous that they would lump that in as a political agenda.”
Olson, an accounting professor who lives in Woodland Hills, said that he and the other candidates are friends who decided to run because they thought the club wasn’t active enough on transportation issues. They made a pass at a race last year, but didn’t get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
He calls the club officials’ charges “kind of bizarre criticism.”
“I don’t consider this a partisan, political race,” said Olson, who contributed almost $2,000 to McClintock between 1994 and 2000. “This is a pro-motorist race.”
Ford, the son of actor Glenn Ford, was a radio talk show host who featured guests like white separatist Randy Weaver. Westmiller’s husband, William, is the immediate past chairman of the California Republican Liberty Caucus, a libertarian wing of the party that Seidenberg belongs to.
In addition, former state Sen. Richard Mountjoy, a Republican who sponsored Proposition 187, the initiative restricting aid to illegal immigrants, sent out a mailer in November endorsing the slate, writing, “This is a great opportunity to help elect four individuals who, I know, will fight on our side.”
McClintock has pushed for a repeal of the vehicle licensing fee, which he has called “that loathsome car tax.”
The car tax, less than 2% of a vehicle’s worth, has been cut by more than half in the last three years. The club has advocated a reduction of the tax to 1%, but McClintock wants it abolished, and expressed his frustration with the club’s position in a heated phone call last fall, according to club leader McKernan.
“He was extremely agitated, very upset,” McKernan recalled. McClintock denies that the conversation was heated.
McClintock has also pushed for an end to what he calls the “double” gasoline tax--the state sales tax that is charged for gas purchases, along with state and federal excise taxes.
Club officials said the organization successfully pushed Gov. Gray Davis to earmark state gas tax revenue for state infrastructure improvements. The club would back an elimination of the tax, along with the vehicle licensing fee, if transportation projects now supported by those funds were guaranteed a secure funding source, according to spokeswoman Carol Thorp.
Auto Club members first got wind of the political battle over the club’s direction this month, when they received a letter from McKernan asking them to back the four incumbents running for reelection. Four members of the board are up for reelection every year.
“Partisan politics has no place at the Auto Club,” he wrote.
At least 500,000 members have to submit their proxies or vote at the annual meeting March 12 in San Diego in order for the election to be valid.
