Tom McClintock
Republican Tom McClintock of Northridge begins a new political career in Sacramento this month as a state senator after serving 14 years during two stints in the Assembly.
And while he may be residing at a new address, McClintock will take his tight-fisted, tax-bashing philosophy with him to the Senate chamber.
Known as a frugal, one-of-a-kind conservative, at times too extreme even for other Republicans, he has had mixed success in the Legislature while representing areas of the west San Fernando Valley and Ventura County. That was until last year, when his proposal to eliminate the state vehicle licensing fee caught on with the public and eventually other lawmakers.
A reduction was eventually passed and McClintock vows to complete the job this year by eliminating the fees entirely. Indeed, McClintock’s auto-related tax cut philosophies have been embraced by a conservative group that is attempting to win seats on the board of the venerable Automobile Club of Southern California to lobby for them. And although McClintock says he is not involved with the auto club slate, he is critical of the organization for opposing his vehicle fee reductions.
Other McClintock causes: the elimination of carpool lanes, which he insists cause congestion; using highway taxes to build new freeways; restarting the state’s program of dam construction to provide clearer and less expensive electrical power.
Whether these issues catch the public’s fancy remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: Although the iconoclastic McClintock may often take the road less traveled, he nonetheless continues to get elected by substantial margins.
The Times recently talked with McClintock.
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Question: What is your agenda for the coming year?
Answer: I’ve already introduced several measures to bring the state’s skyrocketing taxes under control. And I will be unveiling broad legislation to restore public works priorities to highways and hydroelectric facilities that were abandoned 26 years ago with devastating results. Long-term, I’m working on a series of sweeping reforms on fiscal restructuring, local government independence, education reform, tort reform and health care restructuring that I hope will provoke some major debates on these subjects.
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Q: How will you attempt to reduce taxes?
A: I’ve already introduced a measure that will finish the job of abolishing the state’s outdated car tax. We’ve reduced that by two-thirds over the last several years, and I will continue to press until it’s fully abolished. I’ve introduced a bill that simply makes the quarter-cent sales tax reduction that was triggered by the state’s reserve a permanent reduction. It was sold to the public as a temporary revenue measure in 1990 just to get the state through those tough economic times. I just introduced a bill that would update and index the homeowner’s tax exemption and the renter’s tax credit. The homeowner’s tax exemption has not been adjusted since the mid-1970s. It used to be about a third of the price of a home; now it’s a very small fraction, and that needs to be updated. And I am proposing using some of the state surplus for rebates of $530 to California families to counteract the effects of rising natural gas and electric bills.
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Q: You’ve been an advocate of increased transportation spending. The governor has earmarked about half a billion dollars for transportation projects in our area. Can more be done?
A: I’ll be reintrodcing legislation that I carried last session to give the governor emergency powers to set aside regulations that have delayed our highway projects, a measure to restore our highway taxes for the exclusive use of highways. And I will continue to press for diamond lane reform. But those measures by themselves will be ineffective unless we confront and challenge and change the radical philosophy that dominates Caltrans, which holds that it’s their job to get people not to use their automobiles. And the sad fact of the matter is, when they stopped building highways 26 years ago, the public kept using automobiles. Now we’re choking in our own traffic. It’s a very simple problem. It is a chronic shortage of highway capacity. And there’s going to be a very big public policy debate on that. That’s why I’ve made only one policy committee request, and that is for transportation.
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Q: What is Caltrans’ position?
A: The new Caltrans director has said publicly that he believes the era of highway construction in California is over. We’re going to either have more of that philosophy or we can recognize that the cheapest and most efficient possible way to move people and cargo is still the highway system.
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Q: Do you have bipartisan support on that point?
A: Publicly, the Democrats are all for transportation. They recognize the severe crisis. But when it comes to actually putting that money into highway construction, they balk. And that is the debate we have to have. For the $2.8 billion that we put into the MTA [Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority] every year, we could be building more than 200 miles of new freeway lanes in the Los Angeles County area alone, at Century Freeway prices. That Century Freeway figure includes condemning huge tracts of developed land, not to mention the many years of expensive litigation that was attached to it. It penciled out at mind-numbing figure of $13.7 million per lane mile, the most expensive freeway ever constructed in history. But it’s a pretty simple mathematical equation: $13.7 million divided into the $2.8 billion budget of MTA produces around 200 miles of new freeway lanes every year, land acquisition, litigation, cost overruns, the works. The fact of the matter is, many freeway routes that are in immediate need of angioplasty wouldn’t cost anywhere close to that figure. I looked, for example, at the Moorpark (23) Freeway that was designed to carry additional lanes. The land is there, graded, ready to built upon and yet it has become impassable.
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Q: Do you support any kind of funding for public transportation?
A: I think mass transit should be funded from the fares that are paid by mass transit users, just as I feel the highways should be paid for by those who use the highways.
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Q: Republicans in the state Legislature have proposed slicing $1 billion from the state’s projected $10.4-billion budget surplus and spending it on swift construction of new schools. Do you support this concept?
A: No, I don’t. I fear they have utterly failed to address the principle problem and that is radical escalation of costs of school construction. Secondly, I fear they are seriously blurring, on this and a number of issues, the distinction between state and local governments. It used to be clearly understood that as we tax people equally across the state, the taxes you pay in San Diego are the same as you pay in Eureka. When we float a bond, every person in the state, wherever they live, is equally indebted to that bond. It used to clearly follow from that that the expenditures we approved from those revenues were to be for projects that benefited all the people equally. The state university system does that. It will accept a student, a qualified student, wherever they live in California. A local school does not. Therefore, local schools were constructed and operated from local revenues. State universities were constructed and operated from state revenues. That distinction has been utterly lost, which is why, I believe, we are seeing so much inattention to state responsibilities.
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Q: What is an example of the radical escalation in school construction costs?
A: If you want a “wowee”number, look at Belmont High School which, granted, is the worst of them. It pencils out per square foot at more than the historic reconstruction of the state Capitol building, with all this priceless artwork and historical craftsmanship, all of its priceless antiques and relics.
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Q: Is that economic reality or bad management?
A: It’s extremely bad management; it’s perverse incentives that are built into the law, such as architects making a percentage of the entire construction cost of the building.
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Q: So how do you undo it?
A: It’s not difficult to do. We have a blueprint of how to do it right. That’s the way we used to do it until the mid-1970s. Local school districts contracted for local schools, usually constructed from a single master plan. They didn’t go out and design schools from the ground up, and they enjoyed huge cost savings as a result.
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Q: What happened to change all that?
A: I think it was a combination of factors. Part of it, I think, was the growth of the state architect in the construction process. Broadly speaking, it was a state education code that grew from four volumes to 11 now, with reams and reams of micromanaging detail on every aspect of the administration of our schools, including construction. And it didn’t used to be that way. We do have some signposts we can look at from our recent history, and the one that I keep focusing on is 1966. The golden age of state government. There was no shortage of schools and we had a population growing at a rate much faster than it is right now. And yet we were able to keep up with all of our school construction needs. Our highways were a model for the world. The state university system was the envy of the country. The mathematics are absolutely stark. If you look at [former Gov.] Pat Brown’s last year in office, he spent about $250 for every man, woman and child in the state in 1966 dollars. If you adjust those for inflation to 1999 dollars, it was about $1,300 for every man, woman and child in the state. This year we’re spending more than $3,000 for every man, woman and child in the state. So we’re spending roughly 2 1/2 times in inflation-adjusted, population-adjusted numbers, than we were spending in 1966, when we were producing all of those things. And, by the way, did I mention the gold medallion all-electric home that was supposed to the be wave of the future? Back in the ‘60s, early ‘70s, electric meters were going to be a thing of the past because electricity was going to be so cheap it wouldn’t make any sense to meter it. Why did they believe that? Because we had unlimited hydroelectric capacity that we were in the process of developing.
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Q: So what happened?
A: A radical ideology was introduced into California public policy in 1974. It is an ideology that has dominated state governance since then through two Republican and now two Democratic gubernatorial administrations. And that philosophy was, as [former Gov.] Jerry Brown stated it, the “era of limits.” To put it more bluntly, it was, “If we stop building things, people won’t come.” So we abandoned our state highway program. We abandoned many projects in mid-construction. I mean, you remember the 23 / 118 freeway gap that sat there for 20 years? We literally walked away from it. At the same time we did that, we walked away from the state hydroelectric program, the state water project. The Auburn Dam sits there unchanged in 26 years. The footings all carved out of solid rock, the diversion tunnels all there and ready. All that remains is to pour the concrete. And not only do you have additional water storage, but you also have huge amounts of hydroelectric power that are desperately needed because we haven’t done anything to build electrical plants or electrical generating plants of any significance in close to 20 years now.
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Q: Which leads us into the deregulation mess. How do you view it?
A: First and foremost, we need to build more power plants. No major power plants have been constructed in this state in a generation. The population has expanded dramatically in that same period of time. The demand for electricity has increased even faster as we’ve become a more and more technological society. And now we don’t have enough power generating capacity in the state to keep a refrigerator running. When you reach that condition, you have to ration a very short supply, and you do it in one of two ways, both of them very ugly. You either ration through high prices, or you ration through rolling blackouts. And we’re experiencing both. The sad fact of it is, this problem was staring us in the face over the summer, and the Legislature basically did nothing. The legislation that was adopted was minuscule compared to the need. The other thing that is frustrating and frightening is the fact that the few power plants that are under construction or someplace in the process are all gas-fired. Well, the price of natural gas is going through the roof. And here we have limitless hydroelectric potential in this state. It’s an absolutely clean, reliable source of massive electricity generating, and we’re ignoring it.
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Q: The Republican Party is very much in the minority in Sacramento, at least for the time being. What is your role and can you still influence policy and legislation?
A: It’s the responsibility of the minority party to offer what I call a vastly better vision of governance than the majority party. That’s the only way a minority can become a majority. And democracy is served by that process because they are assured that half of the political process is constantly searching for a better path and that in every election they are being presented with a clear choice in directions. In my view, the Republican Party did that very effectively in the 1980s and stopped doing it in the 1990s. And the elections ought to teach us an important lesson, and that is if you don’t stand for anything, don’t be surprised if nobody votes for you. As far as legislation, I’ve found, over the years, that arguments are what pass bills. Again, when I introduced the first measure to abolish the car tax, I was told that it was dead on arrival. Not only would no Democrat vote for it, but most Republicans wouldn’t. So I took it to the public. And we had a great big debate on the subject. And the result is two-thirds of that tax is now gone and the other one-third, I think, will be. The votes cast in the Legislature, and for that matter, the members who come to the Legislature, only come as the result of public policy debates.
The minority party’s responsibility is to provoke those debates. The task is becoming easier and easier. We’re taking more of your personal income than we have ever taken in the state’s history, including the years before the tax revolt of 1978. We’re taking more than $9 out of every $100 that you make, and that’s just for the support of state government. We increased the size of the state government 20% last year alone. And yet, what have we delivered with all of this record amount of money that we’re spending? A Third World power system that is now subject to rolling blackouts on any given day, a water system that can’t even store one-year’s water consumption, a school system that has ranked consistently at the bottom of the nation in its performance, a highway system that is in chronic gridlock. We are spending more and delivering less than ever.
