Land Access News

Beach Yamaha recognizes that there are a myriad of issues that face the sport we all care so much about. Increased restrictive legislative proposals including street licensed vehicles land closures and restrictions, waterway closures, and the like - all have a profound negative effect on the motorized recreation we chose to participate in.

Beach Yamaha staff strives to provide a timely and accurate information - from trustworthy sources - and provide you notification of the issues we face and what we can do about it.

10/11/2010 - Gene Chappie Inducted into the Off-Road Motorports Hall of Fame
The following is a speech given at the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame (Reno, Nevada) induction ceremony by Robert E. Ham - a founder of CORVA - for a great friend of motorized recreation.

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Eugene (Geno) Chappie

 

It was 1969 or so when a bunch of off road vehicle clubs got together to form CORVA, the California Off Road Vehicle Association. We knew we had to get organized because we could see that things were changing, and we knew that ORV people were going to have to organize and stand together to protect our right to participate in our favorite activity.

The BLM was being phased out because their old mission as the “Land Office” was winding down. Those desperate bureaucrats recognized that the emerging ecology movement would provide them with a critically needed relevancy, and they immediately began proposing new rules, regulations and fees on us, where none had previously existed.

 At the same time the State Park System had already closed several popular recreation areas to off road use and was setting their sights on closing the very popular Pismo Dunes.

Concurrently, housing developers began expanding urban limits by converting what had previously been popular riding areas into new suburban subdivisions.

With all this going on, we also heard about legislation that was already most of the way through the legislature that would require all non-street legal vehicles to register with the DMV just so the state could raise money, and people could have a way of reporting vandals who were supposedly riding dirt bikes all over the new neighborhoods that were being carved out of former riding areas throughout the state.

That particular bill failed passage only because the legislator who carried it had a heart attack and the bill died when he passed away.

The next year, I was summoned along with several other Off Road organization leaders to meet with Assemblyman Gene Chappie. I was told that Chappie is jeeper and snowmobiler and wants to help us. We all sat down in a small office on the second floor of the state capitol building in Sacramento and  he began speaking to us. He was quite blunt, over the years I would come to find that was but one of his admirable traits. You always knew where you stood with Geno, because he didn’t pull punches.

He knew he was talking to a bunch of people who had been enjoying the outdoors on dirtbikes, jeeps and buggies with relatively few rules and restrictions for years, and that was part of what drew us to this activity. He didn’t pull any punches when his first words to use were: “ITS  ALL OVER NOW, things will never be the same”.

He went on to explain that “There are people out there who want to shut us down altogether and it is coming from both parties. People in this capitol don’t understand us, and they are ready to drop the hammer”. He assured us that the votes were there the previous year to pass the bill that died with the author. He told us he had a plan, and he had already started discussions that could divert this effort to regulate us, into a program that would ensure that we would always have places where we could enjoy our sport.

 What he presented to us was his idea to go along with the idea to make us register our vehicles. We were going to lose that battle anyway, so we need to get something in return. And that is where Chappie began to lay out his game-plan to use this opportunity to put the State of California in the role of promoting off road use, rather than trying to shut us down.

His idea was to create a new registration program with a fee that would go to the Department of Parks and Recreation to acquire land where we could legally operate our off road vehicles. We were pretty skeptical. But Geno was pretty persuasive.

He kept bringing us back to the reality that just not wanting bad things to happen to us, were not going to prevent bad things from happening to us. He insisted we had to be proactive. And boy was he right.

He had already convinced a fairly environmental-leaning legislator to become a co-author of this milestone legislation. Before we left his office, most of us agreed to help him and the crusade began. Later that year, the Chappie-Z’berg Off Highway Vehicle Act of 1971 was approved by both houses of the legislature. Governor Reagan signed it into law in December of 1971 in a ceremony on the North steps of the State Capitol that was attended by bikers, 4 wheelers, and buggy owners, along with a display of our jeeps, buggies and dirtbikes.

Chappie’s willingness to bluntly tell us we had to get proactive and to have a plan or we would be sunk in less than a decade was the spark that created the nation’s first off road vehicle program. His legacy is a program that now collects and spends just south of $100 million per year, in support of 8 ORV Recreation Areas from the Feather River in Northern California to Imperial County in the Southeast corner of the state.

Since 1972 the program has collected and spent an astounding one billion dollars from registrations; fuel taxes; and park admission fees. They manage 125,000 acres in 8 ORV areas and were host to 4.5 million visitors in 2008. A staff of 250 state employees operates these facilities, and administers a grant program that provides assistance to the Forest Service and BLM; cities and counties that provide ORV opportunities; and to special districts and non-profits to deliver services that promote the use of off road recreation.

Without the availability of this money flowing to help manage federal ORV areas, the feds would have closed millions more acres, and permits for races and large events would  have ceased to exist years ago.

But Geno didn’t do one bill for us and then pronounce the problem solved and go on to deal with other issues. He was an off roader at heart, and this first bill was just the start of his long range vision.

A year after he got the landmark legislation that got the state into the business of promoting, rather than fighting, off road, he went after another source of money to make the program go. Again he teamed up with an environmentalist legislator and went after the portion of gasoline taxes that were paid into the highway fund by these newly registered off road vehicles. Since these vehicles were not allowed on highways with just their green sticker registration, Chappie argued that their portion of fuel taxes should go to the OFF HIGHWAY and not the HIGHWAY fund. Chappie approached Senator Arlen Gregorio to co-author bill, and by 1973 all of the fuel taxes that were estimated to be used by these green stickered vehicles went into the off highway vehicle fund that was created by his first bill.

That bill passed relatively easily, since we could argue that with the new registration program we now knew how many of these vehicles were out there. It was a “no-brainer” argument that our taxes should not go to highways that we are not allowed to use with our green sticker registrations. He used the boating program, and the aeronautics fund as examples of the precedent that had already been set. He got the bill and the money from this source immediately increased the size of the program to a level where the Department of Parks could actually start acquiring land.

The next year, Chappie set out to bring us our biggest prize. After having carefully laid out his arguments in previous years that it was just not right to put the fuel taxes from off road vehicles into the highway fund when the fuel was not used on a highway, he carried this logic forward in his next bill that would declare all fuel taxes that street-legal off road vehicles used when they were travelling off of the highways should also go to the off-road fund. His bill required the Department of Motor Vehicles along with the Department of Transportation and the Department of Parks and Recreation to do a study that would determine how much fuel was used by jeeps, dual sport bikes, and other street legal vehicles in recreational off road travel.

By the time this bill was enacted in 1974, the small fee to register ORVs from his original bill, which amounted to $15 every two years, or $7.50 per year, was a miniscule part of the total revenue that was now supporting the program. By now, most of the ORV groups that did not originally go along with Geno’s idea of how to make ORV a relevant player in state politics were fully supportive and became true believers. (I won’t embarrass those groups here by mentioning them by name as they have long since acknowledged that their initial opposition to the original bill was very short-sighted).

Over the next 5 or 6 years, Chappie continued to put pressure on the Department of Parks and Recreation to move forward with the program, and even though a very supportive Governor Reagan had now turned over the reins of power to a far less supportive Jerry Brown, California went on to create a State Vehicular Recreation Area at the former Pismo State Beach; at Clay Pit near Lake Oroville.

 They were acquiring a brand new ORV area at Gorman on the top of the grapevine; at Carnegie Park in the East Bay are; and they took over the management of the privately-owned Hollister Hills Motorcycle Park that was in danger of being sold  to developers.

Next they would begin acquiring BLM and private lands in near Ocotillo Wells to carve out yet another State Vehicular Recreation Area. All of these were dedicated to ORV recreation some of which are among the largest units of the entire State Park System.

When Geno wasn’t busy helping us in Off Roading, he was working hard on water and agricultural issues on behalf of his district which included the foothill and mountain communities east of Sacramento. In 1980 his local supporters convinced him to run for Congress so he could be there to help his old friend Ronald Reagan, who was making his run for the presidency that year.  In 1980 both Chappie and Reagan won their elections. Chappie’s well known sense of humor and his ability to bring sides together served him well in Washington and he quickly became a popular member of the House of Representatives.

While he was in the Congress, Geno started promoting the same kind of idea for the nation that had worked so well in California. He was talking up the idea of taking the federal fuel taxes that were used off-road and create a federal trails program. The idea caught on with the AMA and the American Recreation Coalition. Years later they would enlist the support of New York Senator Moynihan, and then finally the good people at the Blue Ribbon Coalition announced that their friend Senator Steve Symms of Idaho would introduce the bill. It was passed as part of the federal transportation authorization, and in every re-authorization since, the Federal Trails Program has been kept.

By the time he was finishing his 3rd term of in the Congress, the grind of cross country commuting began wearing on his then 67 year old body. Chappie announced that he did not plan to seek re-election to a 4th term.

Almost as soon as he returned to California with the intent of retiring from public life, he received a call from Governor Deukmejian. A vacancy had occurred on the Off Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Commission that was created to oversee the Department of Parks and Recreation on the administration of the off-road program that still bears his name. Chappie accepted the appointment and served alongside another Hall of Famer, Ed Waldheim of CORVA.

Very quickly his colleagues on the Commission elevated him to the Chairmanship of the Commission and he continued to provide extraordinary service to the community of off roaders, most of whom were not even involved in the sport 17 years earlier when he laid out his vision to provide us the resources to make sure that there will always be a place to ride and race in California.

Sadly, Geno passed away 5 years after returning to California in 1992 at age 72.

While Chappie is remembered for many of his legislative accomplishments over the years, when old-timers around the capitol gather to talk about the old days, the conversation always turns towards his sense of humor. “Geno stories” are some of the most frequently repeated instances of how that place worked when things actually got done.  It was people like Geno, who counted among his close friends both Republicans and Democrats. He was as likely to be seen joking with Governor Reagan as he was with Willie Brown, both of them counted him as friends and both would ask him for help when important legislation needed to be hammered out.

He was one of the legislature’s true optimists, who always could find a way to put a positive spin on any situation. To sum that up, I could relay a story that was recently told to me by another of his legislative colleagues from those days.  When he and Chappie were walking precincts to help a friend get elected to the State Senate in a Central Valley district that notoriously favored the other party, Chappie remarked about how well he thought they were being received by saying that wherever they went people were encouraging them on by giving them half of a V for victory.

And that my friends is classic Gene Chappie, it gives me great pleasure and goose-bumps to see his picture go up on that wall as our newest member of the Off Road Motorsports Hall of Fame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

8/31/2009 - GAO Report on OHV Recreation - Some Interesting Conclusions
8/27/2009 - American Motorcyclist Association Expresses Concern Over Health Care Debate
8/14/2009 - US Forest Service "Roadless Rule" Challenged Again!
7/29/2009 - Another $ 22 million "borrowed" from California State OHV Fund
7/13/2009 - ACTION ALERT: Support the National Recreational Trails Program
7/8/2009 - BLM may have funding for Glamis Dunes trash collection in 2009-2010
7/1/2009 - ACTION ALERT - More California OHV funds to be raided by Legislature???
7/1/2009 - BLM to Fast Track Solar Development in the California Desert
Beach Yamaha, Inc.
19721 Beach Blvd. Huntington Beach, CA 92648
Telephone: 714-536-7555 Fax: 714-969-8765