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About Bob Ham

The Coalition

As 2017 dawned, and people across the country tried to shake the New Year’s Eve cobwebs from their brains, California’s off-road riding community faced a sobering deadline.

Their vaunted state Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Program, signed into law in 1971 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, faced extinction.

Without favorable action by the California Legislature, come Jan. 1, 2018, the state OHV Program would be no more.

Enter a coalition of off-road enthusiast, competition and industry groups that convinced California Assembly Member Patrick O’Donnell (D-Long Beach) to introduce a bill (A.B. 1077) that would save the program and make it a permanent part of the Department of Parks and Recreation (State Parks) system.

When O’Donnell’s bill quickly got tied up in the Assembly and eventually was killed, the OHV community was stuck with another bill (S.B. 249) originally backed by OHV opponents.

Bob Ham—a longtime motorcyclist, off-road racer and staunch advocate for responsible off-road recreation—found himself at the forefront of the effort to negotiate with legislators, state agencies and the Governor’s Office to massage the bill into legislation that—in its final form—would make the OHV program a permanent part of State Parks.

A bill was introduced to provide the funding.

For his essential role in rescuing the California Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Program, Ham is the 2017 AMA Motorcyclist of the Year.

The AMA Motorcyclist of the Year Award acknowledges the profound impact an individual or individuals have had on motorcycling in the past year.

“Bob Ham has been a leader in off-road advocacy in California for many years, and his work on S.B. 249 in 2017 illustrates both his dedication to OHV recreation and his political acumen in navigating the halls of the state legislature,” said AMA President and CEO Rob Dingman. “The contacts, friendships and alliances he built during the past few decades proved their value when the OHV community was faced with a bad piece of legislation and the possible demise of a great and beneficial program.”

Nick Haris, AMA western states representative, worked closely with Ham on the coalition hammering the kinks out of S.B. 249 and transforming it into model legislation for off-road recreational programs.

“The OHV community owes Bob a huge thanks,” Haris said. “His long commitment to and historical knowledge about the OHV program is unrivaled, and it was critical to our success with S.B. 249.”

The Program

California’s Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Program was created in 1971 to provide the state with a better way to manage its growing demand for OHV recreation, while acknowledging the need to protect natural and cultural resources and engender respect for private property.

Ham was involved in getting that legislation passed. It was his introduction to off-road advocacy.

“I read an article in the newspaper about a bill that had been introduced in the legislature to ‘control’ the fad of off-roading on public lands,” Ham said. “This was about 1968 or so.

“I wrote some letters, and then began contacting my local assemblyman’s office to encourage him to oppose the bill,” he continued. “That office actually put me in touch with a motorcyclist activist named Russ Sanford, whose organization lobbied for motorcyclists in California. He put me in touch with some other off roaders who were concerned about closures of public lands, and we began talking about forming a single group to focus solely on these issues and would include all kinds of off road enthusiasts.”

While that early bill didn’t move forward, “the wheels were already in motion,” Ham said.

“Our fledging group was committed to starting the California Off Road Vehicle Association, which we did in 1969,” he said. “The next year, we got a jeeper who was an assemblyman named Gene Chappie to introduce a bill, to replace the earlier bill that was designed to restrict us, that would raise money to buy and set aside areas specifically for off-road vehicle use. That bill was A.B. 2342, that was signed into law on the steps of the state capitol in December 1971 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.”

A year later, Chappie and Sen. Arlen Gregorio—again supported by Ham and his group—introduced legislation that requires that all gas taxes from fuels consumed by off-road vehicles be deposited into the state OHV Fund, instead of into the highway fund. With this funding available, the program began to expand.

“In 1982 we got a bill passed that created the OHV Commission, so that citizen off roaders would provide oversight on the spending of OHV Fund monies and create a forum for off roaders to be heard about issues of concern,” Ham said. “In spite of numerous raids by the legislature in bad budget years that diverted money from our OHV program, we now have nine State Vehicular Recreation Areas in California, and through grants to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, the OHV commissioners have some oversight into how those federal agencies manage areas for off road recreation.”

Today, the OHV Program oversees the nine SVRAs that offer services and amenities, such as trails and tracks; restrooms, camping and water; OHV parts stores; law enforcement, first aid and rescue personnel; educational activities; maintenance, erosion control and wildlife management.[/dt_quote]

The OHV Program is the largest and among the most successful of its type in the United States.

“I personally had a hand in writing most of the language for the bills described above and worked on some 50 or more other bills that were specifically designed to improve recreational access for off roaders on California public lands,” Ham said. “I was the lead lobbyist on most of these issues for over two decades. Over the years, I had the privilege of working with several of the professionals from AMA, especially Rob Rasor, Dana Bell, Jim Bensberg, and currently with Nick Haris.”

The Battle

The 1982 bill creating the OHV program, introduced by Assembly Member Bruce Young and Sen. Bob Presley, included a provision that instituted a five-year sunset.

Under sunset provisions, programs end unless the legislature acts to renew the program. This new law required the state to approve the OHV Program every five years to keep it alive.

In 2007, the five-year sunset was lengthened to 10 years. And that provision set up the battle of 2017.

About the time the OHV coalition’s renewable bill was breathing its last gasp in the Assembly, a group long opposed to OHV recreation convinced Sen. Bob Allen (D-Santa Monica) to back a bill that would have extended the OHV program for another five years, but also would have devastated it.

Allen’s bill (S. B. 249) required a host of new regulations, mandated studies, more committees and additional reports.

All told, the new bill would cost the state an additional $11 million a year, with no appreciable benefit.

Even worse, S.B. 249 originally would have allowed state officials to divert user-paid fees to non-OHV purposes.

“As a longtime on- and off-highway rider in California, I don’t want the funds I contribute toward my recreational rights to be used for non-OHV purposes,” Haris wrote in the May 2017 issue of American Motorcyclist. “I demand my dollars be used for their originally-intended purpose.”

With such an ominous bill pending and the program deadline approaching, Ham and his fellow advocates went to work.

“We HAD to fix S.B. 249 and then work to get it passed,” he said.

Ham was prepared.

“I went to work for the California legislature in 1978 and learned a lot about the technical aspects of the legislative process,” he said. “After working for the legislature for seven years, I started a lobbying practice. My first client was a consortium of off-road organizations, including Districts 36 and 37 of the AMA; CORVA; Cal 4 Wheel; the California ATC Association; CALNEV Snowmobile Association; and others.”

Later, Ham worked with the Motorcycle Industry Council, the Motorcycle Safety Foundation and the Specialty Vehicle Institute of America.

“After 20 years of lobbying professionally and with my experience working on the inside of the legislature, I had a lot of insight into how to work a bill and develop a strategy, and how to negotiate to achieve an acceptable outcome,” Ham said.

Even with that experience and the support of two dozen organizations, Ham felt trepidation.

“I tend to be an optimist, but I never could have believed early on that we would change this bad bill into an outcome that we were happier with than were the bill’s original sponsors,” Ham said. “I always felt that this was going to be the year that we would at least reach our goal of making the program permanent, but I was not optimistic that we could have pulled off everything we were able to get out of this.”

In addition to lobbying the legislature, Ham was working through political channels to get help from the state Department of Parks and Recreation.

“The turning point began when the Department of Parks and Recreation finally got the go-ahead to engage with the legislature to turn the direction this bill was going,” Ham said. “They became the arbiters between the bill sponsors and the off-road coalition.”

Lisa Mangat, the director of parks and recreation, was a key ally.

“She continued to remind the public and legislators that no other program within her department has to deal with sunsets, and that this program has been around for 46 years, so it is time to make it permanent,” Ham said.

But time was passing quickly.

“While most of my friends were out playing in the Baja desert or at some beach someplace over Labor Day, I was trading emails with other members of our coalition and then getting back to the DPR reps with language to counter a proposal that was being proffered by the senator’s office,” he said. “We had a deadline that literally required us to have hammered out our language by the Tuesday after Labor Day.

“Several times, I had to flat out tell them that we were ready to walk away and just let the program die,” Ham continued. “Later, I would get a revised version that would also be titled ‘last and best offer.’

“By about 9 p.m. Labor Day evening,” he continued, “we finally had agreed in concept to the ideas that would be submitted to Legislative Counsel to be drafted into the final bill that would be taken up on the floor of the Assembly later that week.”

The Victory

All of those efforts won the day.

On Sept. 15, S.B. 249 and its associated funding bill, S.B. 159, passed the legislature and were submitted to the governor.

On Oct. 3, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bills, making California Off Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Program a permanent fixture in state government.

“I was very happy,” Ham said. “But I also had to remind all of our coalition members who worked so hard on this to be careful about how they release the information to their constituencies. It would not serve us well to put out messages to the effect that we just ‘kicked some enviro ass.’

“We had to put out public messages praising how the process worked to assure people that a balanced bill had passed the legislature. If we had gotten overly boastful about how we beat them at their own game with their own bill, they might just get angry enough to work the Governor’s Office for a veto. We were still walking on eggs until the bill was actually signed and chaptered into law.”

Ham said one of the best lessons he learned during his decades of advocacy is to “treat your adversaries with courtesy and respect.”

“They may disagree with you today on this issue,” he said. “But, next year, or next week, you may have work with them on another issue that comes along.”

Still, the victory was savory.

“All of our allied off road recreation and business allies coalesced into a powerful voice to convince the California legislature to make the OHV program a permanent part of state government,” Ham said.

“At the beginning of this year’s legislative session, the off-road groups agreed that their main goal for 2017 must be to continue the OHV program and to finally make it permanent after 35 years of having to fight to continue the program every five or 10 years, as previous legislative sunsets would come up for renewal. We accomplished that, and much more.”

The permanency of the program gives off-road enthusiasts more leverage in the way the OHV program is administered, he said.

“In the past, we were subject to sunsets every five or 10 years, which made the program fair game for our critics to try to put stuff into the law that would put additional unnecessary restrictions on off-road recreation on the public lands,” Ham said. “In order to keep the program, we would have to accept some changes.

“Now that we are no longer faced with this need to pass a bill to reauthorize us every few years, we can just work at killing bad bills, because they can no longer make us accept bad compromises.”

The (Off) Road Ahead

For Ham, this won’t be the final battle.

“I have the time and energy and, mostly, the knowledge to be able to help,” he said. “And I never wanted to just retire and sit around. As long as I can contribute something on my time and on my terms, I will continue to stay active.”

Ham said the most important tool for any advocate is “a well informed and engaged constituency.”

“Social media and our organizational publications, including American Motorcyclist, getting out the word in real time is key to moving legislators to our position,” he said.

And he believes everyone should get involved at whatever level they are capable of.

“Join and support an off road advocacy group,” Ham said. “If you can’t volunteer time, consider making a financial contribution.

Even though most of our groups are largely volunteers, when we have to hire lawyers or lobbyists to fight for your rights there has to be money available.

“If you can, consider joining several groups and continue to support their efforts with calls and donations.”