#184 - Meet Brett Scott VP of Goverment Affairs for NIADA

Welcome to the Independent Dealer podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. A podcast by Dealers for dealers. Here we go.

I'm Brett Scott, vice president of government affairs for the association. To give you some background of who I am and where I came from for the past two years, previously to coming here, I was a senior policy advisor, senior government affairs officer for Secretary Chao at Department of Transport. And then my portfolio at the department was covered maritime, railroads, trucking, nhtsa. Just a pretty broad portfolio.

A lot of transportation.

A lot of transportation. That's my. That's my thing, is transportation.

Are you a D.C. guy? Have you always been to D.C. or.

Yeah, born and raised in D.C. i'm in the outskirts now I'm in Annapolis, but that's like 30. That's like 20 miles outside. But give or take, the time of day can range from an hour to.

Covid traffic.

No, Covid.

Covid traffic. Yeah. 15 minutes. You know, pandemic. Pandemic traffic. But so that. Previously to the administration, I was doing lobbying work for an association called Cruise Lines. Cruise Lines International Association. So that association covered about 95% of their cruising around the world.

Aren't you glad you got out of that in time?

That's what everybody has told me since.

Sounds like a mess right now.

Dot and then did that for close to two years. And then previously to that, I was doing lobbying as well. Federal affairs and State. Federal affairs. State affairs for a shipping company called AP Mower Maris. Big, big star. Big blue holes. Okay. They were also the shipping company from the movie Captain Phillips. Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, we met that guy here a couple years ago.

Oh, did you really? Yeah. Cool guy. Yeah, he's a cool guy. He's a cool guy.

So let's. Let's talk about what dealers need to know. I think the first place to start is the pack.

Yeah.

Because the pack is super important. Dealers may not know out there what a pack is. What is the Niada pack, and how is it used?

Sure. So the pack is our way of being. There's an old saying in D.C. that if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. And so the PAC provides our members the chance to be at the table rather than being on the menu. And, you know, that gives us not only the chance to contribute to a member of Congress in the Senate or House side that has been an advocate for us in the past or could potentially be an advocate for us in the future. And in doing meetings with our fly ins, the National Policy Conference, you know, not only Are we going to be meeting with members of Congress and explaining to them our concerns and what's worrying us? But then we could potentially do events.

Right.

Similar to what I'm going to talk about later is the coffee with Congress. And the pact just provides our members, like I mentioned, the chance to have the seat at the table to be the authoritative voice for the used car industry and to be the front lines to members of Congress.

And that money comes from dealers like us. We have to give to the pack individually so we get money there. I make it a point. I give money every month at the pack because I believe it's super important for us to do. And dealers out there who aren't doing it, you need to be giving money because as he said, if we aren't at the table, we're on the table.

Right.

We're getting eaten. So with the new administration that is coming come in, things have changed a little bit.

Yep. And allies are more important now than they were, you know, ever before. So yeah, I mean that's, that's the pack. That's, you know, hopefully with the. Unfortunately we couldn't do an NPC live this year. We're doing our coffees with Congress.

Yeah.

What is that talk about that?

Yeah, sure. So coffees with Congress is another way that our members can have front and center, you know, 35 to an hour long conversations with a member of Congress. And we've started those just one because we weren't doing a live conference this year. But we're actually going to continue these coffees of Congress even into next year, even when we're doing a live npc.

So next year npc.

Next year npc. But these, like I mentioned, these events are just they opportunity for members to engage with their local representatives and their districts. So we started off with a few in Alabama. Congressman Adderholt, Congressman Mike Rogers, and they were narrowed down into those members that are specific to his district. Right. As elections are becoming closer and closer and vote counts, members are looking at the best option or the best way to, to interact with their constituents.

Right.

Nowadays elections are won by, you know, local, local elections are won by 1, 2, 3, 5 votes. You know, then you have larger midterm elections that could be won by 100 votes. And so members are trying to engage as much as possible their specific constituents. And we're trying to bring that to them. So these, these events, we originally started off to be pretty narrow and straight directly to the constituents our members that are in say Congressman Anholtz district. But now we've kind of broadened it out. We're including AECs, we're including the legislative board, we're including the board in general, we're including state presidents. And just having the opportunity to engage with as many members of Congress as possible.

And then when we do need them and need them to be allies, we can just go to them and say, hey, remember that time we talked? Remember that check we gave you?

Exactly right. It's similar to what we had today at the convention. Okay. Right. Congressman Buddy Carter was recently on our conference of Congress. He's been great. His staff has been phenomenal. And, you know, we. I thought, why not have him come to our convention? Unfortunately, it was virtual because the House was in session. Okay. And have him speak and engage with our members. And we have a good amount of membership in Georgia, in his district as well. And so it's great to have him see who his potential constituents are, engage with us. And then when we do have the live policy conference and we have a meeting with him, he's like, I know the NIDA guys. I want to be in that meeting.

They recognize the name. But even better is you're educating them, too.

Right? Exactly.

So when they say, hey, we have an issue like, you know, national recalls, we're going to ground every car with an open recall, you can come in, or the dealer, even better, can go to him and say, hey, here's why that's bad.

Exactly.

You might think this is a good idea from that side that you've heard, but here, let me tell you from the ground, as a business owner, here's what bad. What else are you seeing in D.C. right now that needs to be on our radar?

I think that's on your radar. Sure. I think the biggest thing that took up a lot of my bandwidth coming on into this role was recalls. And that's what I heard a lot of. A lot of dealers saying is worried about recalls, because with the Democrat House, Democrat Senate, Democrat White House, it was kind of the perfect storm for this particular legislation to get passed. Thankfully, in coordination with Nada and Cox and naa, we were able to proactively engage with members of Congress on the Senate side as they were drafting up their portion of the infrastructure bill to make sure that recalls wasn't included.

Yeah, yeah, that could have been.

Maybe dealers out there don't understand what was trying to be done with recalls. And as I understand is Blumenthal, maybe. Was that right? Wanted to. Essentially, if a car had an open recall, you couldn't sell it. You couldn't do anything.

Yeah, exactly.

Did we finally get him to understand what that would do to, to a car or maybe other people or car's value or did other people kind of say, and we're just not going to do that?

Yeah, I think, I think what our approach was is that we had meetings with Senator Blumenthal and to answer your question, the recall language that he was promoting was the prohibit. You could not sell a car with an open recall seller or lease it, period. So not only was it hurting us as our members, but it was hurting the auctions, it was hurting, it was.

Going to hurt individuals.

Imagine how many cars would be grounded.

Well, exactly. And so we were focused on, of course, meeting with his staff and trying to explain our position. But then we focused on moderate Democrats, Senator Sinema Manchin Tester out of Montana, West Virginia. And so we focused on those moderate Democrats that understood, you know, the consequence. The consequences. Consequences exactly. Of this bill, especially as our members are slowly getting back onto their feet. But you know, post pandemic.

Yeah.

And you know, they were understanding it and they understood it. And so thankfully, when not only our lobbying efforts, but when the White House is saying that they want to have a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Well, bipartisan needs more than 50 votes.

Yeah.

Especially in the Senate. So nothing, no recall language is going to be included because it needs to be bipartisan.

Beside recalls in the infrastructure bill, is there anything that the car dealers can look to that may help our industry with the infrastructure bill? Is there anything in there that that could help us sell more cars or do something different than what we currently do, you think?

Not to my knowledge. I don't think so. I think the main focus was is not making sure, not making, making sure that the recalls wasn't included.

It provides for EV infrastructure.

Right, it does. And the, that could help us mainstream EVs.

If we are a dealer that wants to get into EVs, you know that.

Yeah.

Building out more charging stations in your neighborhood and making it more usable, I guess.

Right. And I think, you know, Biden's proposal originally, infrastructure proposal, I should say, had the, we were calling it cash for hunters 20 point know where it had this stipend where it kind of forced people to trade in gas powered vehicles for EVS and you receive a $12,500 stipend. It was, it was, it was a lot.

There's not enough EVs to handle that volume.

Exactly. And we were, you know, we were, in addition to lobbying on recalls, we were saying, well, we understand the need for the want to go electric. But one, the infrastructure isn't there. Right. As all of us know, when you're traveling to visit family up and down the east coast or wherever you're going, you stop at a, at a rest stop or a gas station and you see five charging stations, but 50 cars waiting for those five charging stations. Clearly it's showing that the infrastructure isn't there. And look, it's great, but don't force people to do it. Let people slowly build into it and let the economy figure it out on its own.

And there's even talk that if there were enough EVs on the system and a local power grid, that it's very possible that the local power grid couldn't even hold it. So I think there's other issues there that may not even have been thought about yet. So that's interesting.

Blue.

Glad y' all got that done. So four years ago and earlier, we were all worried about the CFPB and the regulations they were going to do to the car, to the buy here, pay here section of the car business. Where are we with the CFPB now? What does it look like moving forward, do you think? What can we do as dealers to not be threatened by that?

So I took it upon myself to proactively engage with CFPB as well, especially with the new administration. So to give everybody a background, Rohit Chopra was being confirmed, was pushed by the Biden administration to be confirmed to take over as the head of the cfpb. Right. His background came from ftc, pretty progressive in thought process, wasn't well, wasn't well, well liked on both sides of the aisle from what I've been told. But he was being pushed from the FTC to take over the cfpb. Of course, his background again came from Senator Warren's office, stood up Dodd Frank, which again stood up cfpb. So as he was being pushed to be confirmed in his Senate confirmation, it was basically voted in a tie so that it sent it to the Senate floor. What we were hearing as that was going on was, well, now that the FTC has a two and two split, right, because it's a five person commission, the White House wanted to have a Democrat come in there as soon as possible. So they were pushing for Lina Khan, who has been confirmed to take over the ftc. So now it's three Dems to Republicans. After, after she would be confirmed, Rohit Chopra would then be pushed through confirmation. A lot of things have happened. Afghanistan has happened, infrastructure has happened. Now this budget reconciliation is happening. And we're hearing throughout the process of his confirmation that some of his responses to his qfrs weren't well liked on, on some moderate Democrats desks. And we're hearing rumors that he might not be confirmed any longer. Now I don't know who's going to be replacing him, but I think where we could be as we could proactively engage the agency as just meeting with them. We've set up quarterly calls with them them and just engaging with them just so they feel comfortable reaching out to us and they're not kind of regular regulating without reason.

Yeah. And I think that's the biggest thing is regulating without reason. Sometimes we hear that a lot coming out of D.C. that especially with a leftist leaning White House that, well, let's find a reason.

Let's just find someone to get mad at.

Let's just do it. Let's, let's, let's throw this out there and see if it's sticks. And we can't have that because bad rules come from that. The ftc, you know the FTC is the organization that kind of looks over our advertising, correct?

Right.

So dealers need to know how to advertise properly and that's the reason we come to conventions and things like this. We just had a very progressive person put in as the head of the FTC Con, Right?

Yep.

So where does that put us now? Now what can dealers do to make sure that we're doing it the right way and how to stay off of her radar?

Sure. And I think it's going in and educating them. Right. And telling our story from my background and my perspective, that's the best way. And so we've set up similar to cfpb, we've set up quarterly calls at their recommendation to talk with them. We have one coming up on the 26th of August this week actually, and that's an introductory call. Probably last about an hour and our board will be on it. You know, hopefully we'll have one coming in two, three months. Following that, just another follow up call. You know, we want to have that relationship. We want them to think of us as their regulator. Right. I want to be able to be that person that they feel comfortable with reaching out to. And that's the best way you're able to get the inside scoop on. Similar to the Hill. Right. A staffer, I was on Capitol Hill for a number of years. A staffer isn't going to jump through hoops for you if you've met them two or three times within the year. Right. If I'm meeting you for the first time as an introductory meeting and then I don't talk to you or follow up with you for the next four months or until I need you, and then all of a sudden, month five, I'm asking you to jump through, you.

Know, the ringer for me.

You'Re not gonna want to do it for me.

What I like too, and I think it's your philosophy and Bob's, you know, is when there is an issue, we have got to be the go to for them. When they have a question on how this is going to affect used car dealers, they need to call us and not someone else. Yeah. Even from a news standpoint, you know, when Forbes wants to quote from how the used car industry is going to handle this thing, how are we not top of mind? And I think that's something you guys have a new focus on making the association the go to source for info.

And I'm hoping, crossing fingers that these coffers of Congress will, you know, I had a mindset that these are small little pebbles and it'll start building into a rock and then it'll start going to a boulder. And that's where I'm hoping that the more that these, the more members that are on these calls that are answering, they're asking questions that are engaging with their, with their representatives, we'll slowly be that authoritative course. I want it, I mean, as much as I want to say I want it right now, I'm hoping we are right now. But I want those copies of Congress as well as, you know, doing regular regulatory calls to be, you know, to be that person that they reach out to when they're at, when they're having questions.

So with that being said, how can a dealer get involved beside the pack? How can we try to get set up with a coffee with Congress for our area?

Happy to reach out to me. My email is@bretidiada.com Feel free to reach me by email, phone call, carrier pigeon, whenever you guys want. I mean, I'm here for you guys.

Yeah. Great. Anything else yet?

That's it. That's awesome. Everyone take action. Guys, if you're listening to this in your car, in your office, wherever it.

Is, send him an email and donate to the pack.

Yes, and donate to the pack.

Thanks, man.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

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Sa.

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