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Salesman Eyman has a car-tax deal for you
Salesman Eyman has a car-tax deal for you
State establishment rocked by his $30-flat-fee initiative
Monday, October 4, 1999
By ANGELA GALLOWAY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
CAPITOL CORRESPONDENT
More than two decades before he pitched a tax proposal that has officials
in this state panicked, Tim Eyman honed his salesmanship skills on a Yakima
playground.
Peddling 10-cent Jolly Ranchers for a quarter, the skinny blond third-grader
stuffed his pockets with silver.
"It wasn't really for the money, although I liked it," said Eyman, now a 33-year-old
political newcomer who has the establishment holding its breath for the November
election.
"I was the don of grade school candy," he said, bursting into the same high-pitched
laugh he uses to mock his critics.
And Eyman has been selling ever since. From selling candy to children to peddling
booze from a bar in his Washington State University fraternity room, Eyman grew
up pushing niche product lines to waiting customers. Today, his Insignia Corp.
markets fraternity and sorority watches to proud parents for the Christmas season.
In his spare time, the Mukilteo man staked out what may be the ultimate political
sales pitch: free money.
Eyman's Initiative 695 asks voters to replace Washington's 2.2 percent motor
vehicle excise tax with a flat $30 fee. It also would require approval for tax
and fee increases -- everything from the state sales tax to the cost of a school
lunch.
Last spring and summer, the public bought his spiel. Eyman and his supporters
persuaded more than a half-million voters to sign petitions for his initiative.
Only one other initiative in state history produced more signatures. It recently
won the support of the state GOP, which initially refused to endorse it because
it guts the $2.4 billion transportation plan they sold voters last year.
"It's almost like mining," said conservative radio commentator John Carlson,
himself an initiative campaign veteran and a pro-I-695 convert. "He tapped a
rich vein that no one had noticed."
But opponents of I-695 say Eyman's plan amounts to fool's gold. More than
half the $2.1 billion the car tax brings in goes to transportation. Road projects
will be decimated, they say. The state allocates another third of that revenue
to counties and cities for programs such as transit, police and fire services
and health programs. Without the money, local governments will be forced to
slash essential services, they say.
"Fears, lies and scare tactics," fires back Eyman, who uses terms such as
"regular folks" and "little guy" as if he trademarked them for use in what he
considers a David-and-Goliath battle. The state could simply use its $1 billion
surplus to make up the difference now, and spend more wisely later, Eyman said.
Further, the savings to taxpayers would be a boon to the overall economy, he
said.
A fast talker who constantly interrupts himself, Eyman paces and waves his
arms while loudly reciting his well-rehearsed and emotive message.
Consider a couple of lines recycled several times this week: "Is it so bad
for you to have more of your own money to be able to take care of your own family?
. . . How can an initiative that benefits absolutely everybody somehow be a
bad thing?"
A relative rookie to politics, Eyman fell into this tax debate scanning the
national political scene for volatile issues that cut to the core of public
policy. He prefers ones that do not affect him personally.
"Ones where I can push them without having that emotional baggage tied to
it," he said. In recent years, he briefly gathered signatures for an initiative
to force a Mariner stadium vote and led another to end affirmative action.
In this campaign, Eyman has exploited his theatrical flair to reach the masses,
Carlson said.
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| Initiative 695 promoter Tim Eyman characteristically paces in the back
yard of his home on the 10th hole of the Harbour Pointe golf course while
being interviewed by a radio station. Robin Layton/P-I |
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"He's entertaining to listen to. Not many politicians are entertaining,"
he said. "He's speaking their language. He connects with them. . . . There are
people who study politics for years and years and never get there."
He's parlayed that ability into building grass-roots support. He says he has
raised about $150,000 to push I-695, mostly in $50 donations.
Even his opponents, who have raised about $850,000 for their campaign, acknowledge
Eyman's knack for making his point -- and making the news.
"He's very good. He stays on message. I have not been around a politician
who has the mastery of a sound bite that Tim Eyman has," said Mark Funk, spokesman
for the No-on-695 campaign.
Eyman embraces that distinction.
"I have come to the realization that reporters don't write nothing down unless
it's somewhat provocative," he said, shortly after replacing the Nautica shirt
he wore with a campaign T-shirt in anticipation of a visit from a newspaper
photographer.
"The biggest frustration I have is that I know that I'm never going to be
able to stand up in front of 5 million people and be able to make the case for
the initiative because I feel like I could convince 5 million people if you
gave me the chance," he said.
He could pull that off, he said, simply because he believes in it.
"You can't do anything well unless you love it. And I mean I love -- absolutely
love -- this initiative and the initiative process," he said.
But collecting signatures may have been the easy part for Eyman, who has the
charm of an unpolished and tenacious chatterbox and a decade of mass-mailing
experience.
"Tim's challenge is that signature-gathering efforts are wholesale," Carlson
said. "The November campaign is retail, and it takes skillful strategic planning
to make sure that the people who support this thing go out and vote."
Eyman has never run an election campaign -- and didn't even vote before
1992.
Born in Yakima and adopted there as a newborn, Timothy Donald Eyman carries
himself with confidence and intensity. Eyman distinguished himself through his
tenacious energy as the youngest of three in a lower-middle-class family.
A serious student with a 3.94 grade-point average, Eyman never served as president
of anything in high school. He was never the best on the football team and wrestling
squad, but he says he gave it his all. He preferred individual athletics, and
quit football in favor of cross-country.
"I never go away. I was never the best, but I was persistent," he said. "They
said I was like a freak of nature because I had this energy level that just
wasn't on the Richter scale."
In college, the business major focused on grades, his walk-on spot on the
wrestling team and the occasional party. Joining a fraternity proved a life-altering,
if last-minute, decision. After graduating with a solid B-plus average, he spent
three months recruiting new members. Then, he moved into his sister's Kirkland
apartment and took a job selling textbooks. But within a couple of months he
fell back on his fraternity system know-how and struck out on his own.
"The idea of working for somebody else didn't appeal to me in the least,"
he said.
Eyman has always been something of an individualist, said his mother, Dolores
Eyman.
"I think he prefers to make his own structure instead of being in a structured
situation," she said. "He wants to be the leader. I think he doesn't want to
be the worker. I think that's just his nature."
So 10 years ago, Eyman borrowed $40,000 using every credit card he could get
and built a business on what he knew: fraternities and sororities.
"Parents were just looking for something to buy," he said.
Eyman answered that demand with watches. He had stumbled across the idea on
an airplane when he saw an ad for mail-order logo watches in the back of a magazine.
Soon he was the middleman between parents and wholesalers that distribute watches
with Greek letters and emblems.
Focused exclusively on sales to parents, Eyman's company flourished for several
years. Then, in 1994, he added the untested market of alumnae, doubling his
postcard mailing list to more than a million addresses. It was a dismal failure,
and he lost everything he'd made in the prior five years.
The next fall, Eyman married Karen, a department store buyer, and the couple
refocused the company on his original niche.
And they've stuck with it, selling the watches from the same cluttered office
that serves as I-695 campaign headquarters in a $433,000 home on the 10th hole
of the Harbour Pointe golf course. Fifteen months ago, they adopted a newborn
son, Jackson.
Politics first caught Eyman's interest when Ross Perot made his 1992 presidential
bid.
In Perot, Eyman found a private businessman making a difference, and an intriguing
message about the government: "They work for us."
Eyman cast his first-ever ballot for Perot and began following politics in
newspapers and on Sunday morning talk shows. A few years ago, a radio show about
a King County petition to force a vote on the Mariner stadium piqued his interest.
He spent two days collecting signatures in his Green Lake neighborhood for the
measure.
Then a California businessman inspired him to lead his own initiative drive.
He said Ward Connerly's successful Proposition 209 campaign to end affirmative
action showed him what one man could do.
"He stood there and took it and never gave them an inch," Eyman said of Connerly's
resilience to criticism. "I mean, the difference he made, almost through sheer
force of will."
Two weeks after Connerly's proposition passed, Eyman decided to do the same
thing in Washington. He and former legislator Scott Smith, a Republican from
Graham, co-sponsored Initiative 200 to end racial preferences in employment
and education.
But a few months before the filing deadline, the campaign was stalled,
with only a fraction of the signatures needed to make the ballot. Eyman turned
back to Connerly for help.
Connerly brought in Carlson. With Carlson at the helm, the initiative made
the ballot and was approved by voters last November.
"As soon as Carlson took over the campaign, I bailed. I was out of there.
I got the heck out of Dodge because I viewed Carlson as being able to do the
job better," Eyman said. " . . . When I handed that child over to Carlson, it
was then his baby to raise."
"You can't have too many roosters in the hen house," he said.
Eyman turned his attention to searching for another initiative to push. He
soon found a measure to cut car-licensing fees in Virginia. The idea enthralled
voters there, and Eyman felt it would be political pay dirt in Washington, too.
"No other issue got them going," Eyman said of the response in Virginia. "That
was the galvanizing issue in that campaign.
"It was one where you wanted to tackle taxes and you had to find a way to
get into that debate where you could get people connected," said Eyman, who
pays $148.50 a year in taxes on his 1990 Nissan 240SX. His wife drives a 1998
Saab 900, and pays $900 for tabs.
Last year, he pushed an initiative to cut car-tab fees to $30. It nearly made
the ballot. True to his style, he brought it back this year, with the provision
requiring voter approval of all tax increases.
As for his plans for the future, Eyman said he can't think past the Nov. 2
election. Except to insist he will never run for public office.
The idea of another initiative is intriguing, he said, since the real power
to make change is in the initiative process.
"That is the area where you can really make a significant difference, more
than any candidate can," he said.
P-I reporter Angela Galloway can be reached at 360-943-3990 or angelagalloway@seattle-pi.com
