Pub. 54 2013-2014 Issue 3

27 2014 SPRING  A TIME TO REFLECT — CONTINUED ON PAGE 28 with the Van Tuyl group, who I worked for at the time. I wanted to understand why we could not get what seemed to me to be simple matters of demonstrable need, taken care of legislatively or in the regulatory agencies that oversaw the industry. It was important to find out why we could not achieve these objectives and fix or eliminate the problems before things got worse. I was comfortable in the political and legislative world, so I started asking questions in the summer of 2007, shortly after that year’s legislative session had ended. TADA was the first place I started in my quest for answers. Then as now, there were talented, capable people working at TADA. You can never get down if you are around Bill Wolters. Bill also does not get enough credit for running TADA as a business. I respect him as someone who gets the maximum lift out of his resources. Karen Phillips is the smartest legal mind in the automotive sector that I have ever encountered. No one works harder, longer or better on behalf of dealers. TomBlanton is retired now, but back then I knew of no one in the country who was as good as he was in deciphering the politics of Austin or reading and writing legislation. Collec- tively, they were seasoned, battle-hardened veterans of the legislative and political process in Texas. Then, as now, they shot straight with me about their challenges. It is hard, even to this day, to pinpoint exactly what our industry had done wrong. To me, it was a failure to develop and maintain relationships in Austin as the political environment changed going into this millennium. I never have held the staff accountable for our reduced status in Aus- tin at the time. That was on us, the dealers. Successful relationships are give and take affairs. Successful relationships lead to productive partnerships. One cannot be demanding and one-sided in all matters and maintain any relationship. It may not have been a fact, but the general perception was that we would not work rationally and reasonably to address concerns that others might have about our business or legisla- tive tactics. Turning around relationships and making them partnerships became my first priority. To achieve our main objectives, we were going to have to support, pass, and imple- ment policies, procedures or laws that we could live with but might not like. Sam Pack was the chair-elect of the TADA Board. I knew Sam to be as en- gaged and committed on behalf of the industry as any dealer I had ever met. I reached out to him to get his read on what was going on. That first conversation would change my life. One thing led to another and fairly quickly Sam had talked me into becoming the chair of TADA’s Legislative Committee when he took over in 2008. I recognized that Sam was “selling” me to get me engaged, but I could not do any- thing but say yes. Steve Late, when he was the chairman of TADA a few years before, told me in response to my question to him on why he would spend time on the board versus working in his dealership, “If none of us (dealers) ever stepped up then it is disgraceful and we will surely lose ground.” Less than a decade later, it appeared that Steve was a prophet. We started out with three simple objec- tives: establish better relationships in Aus- tin; get an increase in the documentary fee passed; and bring back the Motor Vehicle Commission, which had been abolished back in 2005. My initial inquiries of legislators and the executive branch did not go well. I was lectured a lot. I actually got tossed out of a couple of offices. Most of what I found out during the first few months was that the displeasure with our side was pretty much universal. From those humble beginnings,