CAR TAX INITIATIVE RUNS OUT OF GAS
Early last summer, Sen. Tom McClintock had a file of papers sitting on his desk along with a check already made out, awaiting the moment that Gov. Gray Davis followed through on his promise to trigger an increase in the vehicle license fee. Within an hour of that action, McClintock vowed, he'd be at the Attorney General's Office filing papers for an initiative to abolish the car tax altogether.
When the moment came, McClintock followed through on his pledge — attracting a swarm of reporters when he arrived at the Department of Justice building to file the initiative.
That was the bang. Last week, with a whimper, the clock ran out on the signature-gathering time period for McClintock's initiative. Needing more than a million signatures, the initiative drive generated only about 600,000, McClintock says.
The problem, McClintock said, were the events that transpired between the time he filed the initiative and the deadline: the recall election and the subsequent action by new Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to bring the rate back down to where it had been before Davis' action. That was short of McClintock's goal of eliminating the tax, but enough to deflate any momentum for the initiative.
"The wind just went out of our sails," McClintock told me today.
This was McClintock's second unsuccessful attempt to qualify a car-tax initiative. Will there be another? Only, he responded, "if they try to increase it again in the future."
