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Vehicle License Fee refund checks will go out Friday, the Department of Motor Vehicles announced this morning. Over the next two months the DMV will send out refunds totaling $4.7 million to Californians who registered their cars in the summer and fall of 2003. Last summer, the state budget deficit triggered an enormously unpopular three-fold increase in the VLF. When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected in October's recall election, the first thing he did when he took office was to repeal the increase. The DMV said this morning the first checks should arrive in mailboxes by early next week. The...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's key campaign promise to roll back a tripling of the state's car tax was challenged directly to the California Supreme Court on Wednesday by a coalition of college students and social activists whose members and clients will bear the brunt of his budget cuts. Opponents of the governor's November tax cut, which saves motorists $4 billion a year in annual registration renewal fees, want a majority of the seven high court justices to overturn the pledge, which has deepened the state's deficit, and along with it, the need for cuts to services. The petition...

<p>Californians have been buying new cars at a breakneck pace since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger repealed an increase in the state's vehicle license fee.</p> <p>New-vehicle retail sales across the state have jumped 19 percent and luxury sales have risen 30 percent, auto industry trade association J.D. Power and Associates said Thursday.</p>

<p>Attorneys for the Legislature raised a legal cloud Tuesday over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's controversial decision to declare a fiscal emergency so that payments could be made to cities and counties to make up for the car tax cut.</p> <p>Although the opinion from the legislative analyst's office asserts that the governor did not have the authority to mandate the payments without legislative approval, it was unclear whether Democratic leaders would use the opinion to try to stop the expenditures.</p>

<p>GOV. ARNOLD Schwarzenegger moved Thursday to declare an emergency of his own creation.</p> <p>There is no doubt about the authenticity of the crisis. Cities and counties throughout the state were reeling at the prospect of losing a combined $2.6 billion from the governor's inauguration-day rollback of vehicle license fees.</p>

<p>Lexicographers of American slang define "wuss" roughly as "weakling." Some believe that it may have originated in a Welsh word for "servant." Regardless of its origin, it's a word that one would scarcely associate with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the muscular hero of dozens of action films before becoming governor of California. Yet, a high-level Democratic staffer described Schwarzenegger as a "wuss" last week in the aftermath of his political surrender to Democratic legislators on his demand for a state spending limit.</p>

<p>In an impressive display of executive leadership if nothing else, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will try to make more than $2.5 billion in disputed payments to local governments despite his failure to win approval of legislation to authorize the appropriation.</p> <p>The money is the amount cities and counties lost when Schwarzenegger rolled back the car tax on his first day in office. The locals say the cash is due them because of an earlier state commitment to make them whole for any money they lost when the tax was cut. Schwarzenegger promised to hold them harmless during the campaign, and after taking office and cutting the car tax he asked the Legislature to help him make good on his pledge. Democrats refused, citing the state´s already overdrawn checkbook. Now the governor says he´ll do it anyway.</p>

<p>Local governments are in an uproar over the car tax cut and the state’s failure to provide the “backfill” that makes cities and counties whole for the lost revenue. Although the locals are describing this as balancing the state budget on the backs of cities and counties, that’s not really what is happening here. The car tax has always been a local revenue source, controlled by the state. If the tax is lowered, as the public seems to have wanted, there is no inherent state obligation to hide the effect of that reduction in revenues by putting it on the state tab. In any case, if the burden is shifted to the state’s books, it will simply force cuts in other programs that people value, or tax increases elsewhere. That $4 billion is becoming like the bulge in the balloon. Budget writers can push on it here, but it simply shows up over there. It won’t go away. Schwarzenegger was foolish to promise in the campaign to make local governments whole even while cutting the tax, as if local government services were somehow more sacred than those provided directly by the state. But now it’s up to him to find a politically acceptable way of doing that or explain why it can’t be done.</p>

Schwarzenegger to Use New Emergency Financial Power Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will declare a financial emergency and bypass the Legislature to provide millions of dollars to cities and counties who lost funding when the car tax was reduced, according to anonymous sources in the governor's office. The powers Schwarzenegger plans to use were authorized in last year's budget agreement. Specifically, the new power allows the governor to impose cuts of up to five percent on any line item in the budget in order to fund an "emergency deficiency." The official announcement is planned for Thursday. Schwarzenegger's aides say the governor's...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Los Angeles City Council and county Board of Supervisors voted on Tuesday to sue the state of California to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues lost when newly installed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger rescinded an unpopular increase in car taxes. The two councils authorized their attorneys to join other municipalities seeking to restore the lost funds, which in Los Angeles County amounts to $2 million a day and is used to pay for fire and police services.

<p>Several days after he signed an executive order rolling back the car tax, which funds city and county services, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger met with a group of mayors from around California and told them exactly what they wanted to hear, a special talent of his. The state will not leave them in the lurch, the governor said. It will backfill the $4.2 billion a year he had just snatched away from cities and counties.</p>

New car tax will take time to kick inSacramento Bee With Gov. Arnold Schwarz-enegger's executive order, Californians' annual vehicle license fee falls from 2 percent of the vehicle's depreciated value to 0.65 percent. For an average passenger car, the rate would drop from $223 to $73. The change is retroactive. Owners who started paying the higher rate Oct. 1 will get rebates, although the Legislature will have to appropriate the money. It will take time for the rate to be reflected in bills. When the rate went up earlier this year, the change took three months to implement. State law...

Governor keeps his promise: Tripling of car tax repealed By Barry Witt Mercury News With the stroke of a pen Monday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger rescinded last summer's tripling of car taxes by decreeing that his predecessor simply got it wrong when he said California could no longer afford to forgo the nearly $4 billion a year the tax raised. It was Schwarzenegger's first official act as governor, fulfilling a campaign promise to repeal the reviled tax, the proceeds of which are distributed to city and county governments. ---------------- DMV spokesman Bill Branch said Monday the department hadn't been formally notified...

Shortly after the 45-minute ceremony on the west steps of the Capitol, the new governor delivered on that promise, issuing Executive Order 1, which repealed the $4-billion increase that had been approved by the man he replaced — Gray Davis. It was the first of a series of rapid-fire actions meant to draw a clear contrast with a Davis administration renowned for its caution. Schwarzenegger issued proclamations to convene a trio of special sessions of the Legislature aimed at overturning a new law that allows illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, cutting workers' compensation costs and capping state spending. In...

Revelation a wrinkle in Schwarzenegger's plan to repeal licensing fee hike SACRAMENTO -- Though part of Republican Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger's No. 1 campaign promise, millions of California motorists paying tripled car-tax bills since Oct. 1 won't get rebates -- unless a Democrat-dominated Legislature agrees to them. The first official disclosure of the little-known hitch in Schwar-zenegger's vow to roll back vehicle license fees came in an interview Friday with the Legis-lature's independent, nonpartisan fiscal analyst. The assessment by Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill puts motorists -- and their pocketbooks -- directly in the middle of what's likely to be an imme-...

<p>A. It likely to take three months for the lower fees to kick in. It will probably take about a month to reprogram Department of Motor Vehicle computers to reflect the change, and the DMV is required to mail VLF bills to motorists at least two months before the payments are due.</p>

This Thursday ,11/13, 3-7pm Ayres Hotel In Ontario 1945 East Holt Blvd. Join the John and Ken show (from KFI640) in a petition rally to repeal the car tax and stop the illegal alien drivers license scheme.

OCEANSIDE, Calif., July 8 — As a single woman in her early 60s living near San Diego, Calif. and making less than $40,000 a year, Nancy Ross is finding it harder to make ends meet these days. So she was hoping the recent federal income tax cut would make life a little easier. But with state and local tax increases more than offsetting her federal tax break, she’s slipping further behind. NANCY ROSS WON’T GET much help from the recently enacted Bush tax cut. She’ll get a small break from the provision that expands the 10 percent bracket to cover...

<p>Rescue California gathers signatures to repeal permits for illegal immigrants.</p> <p>Rescue California, which provided paid signature gatherers in the effort to recall Gov. Gray Davis, will begin circulating petitions today to repeal a law that would allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses.</p>

Various state and local officials want Schwarzenegger to preserve the car tax rate that tripled under Gov. Gray Davis, contending that the money pays for lifesaving fire and emergency services now being marshaled against the wildfires. They are also hoping Schwarzenegger will raise taxes under a caveat that he carved for himself: Such a move would be considered in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. "I don't believe that it's in the moral fiber of the Legislature or the governor-elect to compound the tragedy experienced by thousands of Californians by reducing the level of public safety on...