RVIA Advocacy Efforts Paying Off Amid Partisan Politics – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News
Given the current political climate, advocacy efforts on behalf of the RV industry can best be described as quiet discussions in the hallways – and that strategy is beginning to pay off, according to the men and women who lobby on behalf of the RV industry and the greater outdoor recreation arena.
“A straight frontal assault is going to result in us being in the wilderness on every single thing we want in California. And so, I would recommend that we stay relatively quiet publicly on what we’re doing, but privately we are pushing as hard as we can,” said Cliff Costa, who as the vice president at California Advocates Inc. in Sacramento is a key figure in advocating on behalf of the RV industry in the Golden State.
Costa was part of a panel discussion during the 2025 RV Industry Association (RVIA) Leadership Conference, held March 3-6 at the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass in Phoenix, Ariz., Titled “Navigating Change and Advancing Policy Priorities,” the panel also included Jessica Wahl Turner, president of the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR), Mark Weller, shareholder at Polsinelli Law Firm, and Jason Rano, RVIA’s vice president of Government Affairs who served as the moderator.
Based in Washington D.C., Weller advocates for variety of the RV industry’s federal initiatives, including the Travel Trailer and Camper Tax Parity Act, a bill that would allow RV dealers to deduct interest on floor plan financing for all RVs. As it is now, dealers can only deduct interest on motorized RVs. Legislation has been introduced several times to correct this, but each time it has failed to pass Congress for various reasons.
From his office in the state capitol of Sacramento, Costa has been especially focused on the recent rules enacted by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) that have significantly impacted motorized RV sales in the Golden State, which have been adopted to various degrees by more than a handful of other states across the nation.
Under Wahl Turner’s leadership, ORR – America’s leading coalition of outdoor recreation trade associations, businesses and organizations, including the RVIA and RV Dealers Association – has helped to pass historic legislation like the Great American Outdoors Act and the EXPLORE Act, and to secure billions of dollars in funding for public land, waters and rural gateways.
What follows is an edited account of the panel discussion.
Rano: Mark, we’ll start with you. One of the top priorities RVIA and RVDA have been working on over the last several years is a fix for the dealer floor plan inventory tax deduction. Can you share a little bit about the journey which the organizations have been on to get to this point?
Weller: The struggles we’re facing, Jason, would be three or fourfold actually.
First, it’s a very small segment that’s affected by this. It’s dealers and then the OEMs that supply those units. And then moreover, we have an industry concentration on the OEM side in northern Indiana that doesn’t give you a broad geographic reach that you need in politics to try to gather some interest and support on those issues. And then, politically, the Democrats didn’t support the 2017 Trump tax cut and really had very little interest in helping make changes or fixes or corrections to that.
So, what do we do with that? I’m a really strong believer in evidence-driven advocacy, so you try to take that data and talk about the economic issues and the impact and what that means for dealers around the country – and then you tell a good story. We meet with people to do that.
We’ve worked closely with RVDA to try to identify dealers around the country. They’re situated in geographic areas where they have a member of Congress that sits on the House Tax Writing Committee, and we’ve used those dealers to try to reach out and educate members about this problem, and how to fix it.
The good news is here at the start of the new Congress, (RVIA Senior Manager of Government Affairs) Samantha Rocci from your team and others have concentrated on members of the House Tax Writing Committee early on, we have seven Republicans on that committee that are already co-sponsors for the fix, and we’re encouraged that as the budget and reconciliation process moves through Congress this summer that we’ll have this taken care of.
Rano: Cliff, can you talk a little bit first about the importance of continuing to be engaged with CARB, and the nexus of CARB, the governor’s office and the state legislature?
Costa: Sure. So, the Advanced Clean Truck (ACT) rule has a chassis component that is impacting the industry’s motor home availability in California. And we engaged early and have continued to engage with the Air Resources Board, and that continues regardless of what happens going forward. And the reason I believe that’s necessary is the Air Resources Board has not just been consistent pain point for this industry, but for almost every industry; they have very, very broad authority and they feel emboldened to use that authority.
And so, walking up into the election, we were engaging in a very high-level conversations with the Air Resources board and their staff. And then the election happened and that changed the political dynamics – at least it relates to CARB. And the reason I say that is now you have this existential threat that the Air Resources Board is worried about, and that is (the Trump Administration) getting rid of their specific California waiver of the Clean Air Act, as well as going in and knocking down a variety of the various waivers, including the Advanced Clean Truck rule.
My point of this is to sort of walk you down the pathway of, look, we had a strategy, we were engaging, then the Trump administration steps in and now a new opportunity avails itself.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t quietly have conversations. You can let your member of Congress know it’s important that this is having an impact on you and your dealerships or your manufacturing.
Rano: Jess, what are some keys to ensuring that outdoor recreation continues to garner bipartisan support and doesn’t get caught up in the hyper-partisan battles that we see in Washington?
Wahl Turner: What was game-changing for the industry as a whole was eight years ago when we got the government to quantify our industry for the first time. So, we are quantified every year by the American Government Bureau of Economic Analysis within the Department of Commerce. And they have told us year and year again that we are a huge contributor to the national economy. Last year it was $1.2 trillion, five million jobs, over 2% of the GDP, and 3.3% of all U.S. employees.
That has allowed us to be the bipartisan industry that we always have been. Because if you lead with economics, everyone can tap into that, everyone can tune into that.
But when you think about RVing in particular – it’s just one of many segments that make up the recreation economy – there’s a big economic activity happening in Indiana. You might think our power is just in Indiana as an industry. Well, Indiana’s been shipping those RVs to dealers all across the country, and they’re being used in every corner of the country, and they’re going to campgrounds and gas stations, and they’re getting their RVs repaired and they’re having an experience.
We touch every community in the country. Every community should care about RV and campgrounds and people getting outside.
The second piece is that everyone has an outdoor experience to share, and you can tap into that. We had a really difficult meeting a couple of weeks ago with someone, but once we got into (his outdoor experience), he had had this really special moment fishing with his dad. This is what you want. You’re not wearing your Republican or Democrat hat when you’re going outside.
Rano: Everyone should feel free to weigh in on this question. With focus shifting daily, hourly and by the minute in Washington these days, what are keys to sustaining long-term advocacy efforts without losing momentum in a rapidly changing political environment?
Weller: Given the nature of that chaos, you just have to be flexible but not lose sight of your core messaging. You have to be true to your core issues and what you’re focusing on, but also be adaptable and have the ability to change quickly.
In all of this, relationships are important. For example, on the tax issue, we were just talking to about 41 members of the House Tax Writing Committee. Only about 25% of those people were around when the 2017 tax bill went through, so there’s a job you have to do of constantly educating people, explaining your issue, the importance of that, what it means to their local economy, what it means to their district, and how important these issues are. In that sense, having a grassroots network to reach out to those people are really important.
And I just would add one other thing: The ability to have the impact of the economic data and industry by state and by congressional district is phenomenal. We go in there and we can say, ‘You have X number of RV businesses in your district, this many jobs.’ And when you look at the economic impact that has, if you’re looking at suppliers, dealerships, campgrounds, they’re large numbers and it’s really impressive.
Wahl Turner: I agree with all of that, and I also think – and I’m biased – but I don’t think you can ever invest enough in GR (government relations) and RVIA does an awesome job of this. I think why GR is so important is I think of it as simmering pots. You have a stove and you have five or six pots simmering, you never know which one’s going to boil. So, you have to be tracking, even if it seems adjacent and it doesn’t seem like it’s core to your business, you have to track that simmering pot because once it boils, you might be able to add (your issue) to it.
I’s amazing how many things you have to keep track of just for your one little issue to ride on that. So, kudos to the team for always having a lot of simmering pots, because that’s where the magic happens.
Costa: So, let me be clear. California is 80% Democratic in our state legislature, which means Republicans are 20%. So, in the state assembly, 60 of the 80 legislators are Democrats, and in the state Senate, 30 of the 40 legislators are Democrats.
You would think a variety of our messaging is coming from two buckets, a Republican message and a Democratic message. But in reality, that’s not true. Not all Democrats are alike, not all Republicans are alike. So, you really have a core message that you’re trying to convey, but you can say it in five or six different ways. You want to approach it from a different perspective.
So, if I’m going in to see a very conservative Republican from a very rural area in California on one of our issues, they’re kind of one of our bread-and-butter folks, they understand who we are. They probably have themselves been active in RVing. But when we go meet with a progressive Democrat, we will talk about the economic value, we will talk about the impact in the community, we will talk about the parks that are in their district.
We will have a different message, but at the end of the day, it is a positive RV message that we are going in with, you just need to figure out who the audience is.
