Auto Club Insurgents Seek to Steer an Anti-Tax Course

Forget the Los Angeles mayor’s race. The real political drama is taking place at the Auto Club of Southern California, where the first contested election in 30 years is heading to court over allegations of unfair campaign tactics.

The four challengers, who are running on a platform to make the 100-year-old club an outspoken advocate for big tax cuts for motorists, claim the club is unjustly using members’ dues and employees’ time to keep the insurgents out of office.

“They are just trying to roll over us like a steamroller and it’s not going to work,” said Carl Olson, an accounting professor and leader of a slate of four candidates running in the April 9 board elections.

Olson and his slate plan to challenge the Auto Club’s campaign tactics in a lawsuit scheduled for a May 8 hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court. Olson hopes the court will overturn the results and order a new election if his slate loses.

Auto Club officials concede that they have used the organization’s money to send out thousands of letters encouraging members to vote for a slate of incumbent candidates endorsed by the club’s board of directors. Club officials also acknowledge that the club has urged employees at its 70 offices throughout Southern California to campaign for the incumbents.

But club officials say such tactics conform to the bylaws of the Auto Club, which operates under the rules of a nonprofit corporation.

“It’s just standard in corporate life,” said Auto Club spokeswoman Carol Thorp.

“It’s totally been one-sided,” Olson said. “They have spent millions and millions of dollars to defeat four qualified candidates.”

The Auto Club of Southern California--a nonprofit organization founded in 1900--provides towing services, insurance coverage and travel assistance to 5 million members from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

In nearly all of the previous Auto Club elections, candidates for the 12-member board of directors have been nominated by a committee of club members selected by the board. Because there have been no other challengers in 30 years, the nominated candidates have been automatically appointed to the board without an election.

This year, however, a slate of four challengers--Olson, Peter Ford, Mark Seidenberg and Robin Westmiller--submitted a nominating petition with 2,300 signatures, qualifying them for the ballot.

For months, Auto Club members have been voting on the election by proxy ballots, which have been mailed to the members and have been available at all club offices.

The proxy ballots will be counted at a meeting in San Diego on April 9. Under the club bylaws, at least 480,000 ballots or members are needed to have a quorum. The slate that gets the most votes is elected.

Auto club officials have accused the challengers of being a partisan slate controlled by conservative lawmakers such as 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.

Olson and his slate have a campaign platform that mirrors McClintock’s politically conservative positions: They want to abolish the state’s car tax and the sales and excise taxes that are charged on gasoline purchases.

But Olson insists that his slate is not controlled by McClintock or any other politician. He said the challengers simply want the Auto Club to become a vocal advocate for lower taxes at the gas pumps and at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

“We feel the Auto Club has been falling down on its responsibility of protecting the motorists,” Olson said.

But Auto Club officials say such positions are too divisive and partisan.

“The whole value of the Auto Club is that we are nonpartisan,” said Thorp, who described the election as a battle “over the heart and soul of the Auto Club and the future of the organization.”

In one of the proxy ballots recently sent to thousands of club members, the club printed a letter from its chief executive, Thomas V. McKernan Jr. In the letter, McKernan said the challengers’ platform “threatens to change the nonpartisan nature of the club’s public policy activities and divert attention from other vital matters.”

He urged members to vote for the incumbents, Edward M. Carson, Donn B. Miller, Joan A. Payden and Gilbert T. Ray.

Thorp said she doesn’t know how many letters were mailed or how much the club has spent to campaign for the incumbents. But attorneys for Olson and the other challengers estimate that the Auto Club has spent between $750,000 and $2 million to support the incumbents.

Thorp said employees at the Auto Club’s 70 offices have been asked to campaign for the incumbents but have not been threatened or coerced into doing so.

Not so, according to a former Auto Club employee at an Orange County office, who said he was fired in January because he refused to collect proxy votes for the incumbents.

The former employee, who asked that he not be identified, said his supervisor told the workers in his office that they could be punished or fired if they failed to collect enough proxy ballots.

“They always stated that we had to get proxies and I always complained about it,” he said.

Thorp said she couldn’t discuss the reasons why the former Orange County employee was fired, but insisted that it had nothing to do with the proxies.

“Nobody has been fired for anything having to do with the proxies,” she said.