11
The
J “Lifeline of the Gasoline Industry, the Independent Gasoline Dealer.” J
CXXVI Edition January 2010
Gasoline Retailers Association of Florida
214 Stevenage Drive Longwood, Florida 32779
http://www.flagas.com
e mail
407-774-9700 SSDA/NCPR-AT
Pat Moricca President Member Service Station Dealers of America
INDEPENDENT BRANDS
VISIT OUR WEB SITE FOR THE LATEST GASOLINE
INDUSTRY INFORMATION AND BENEFITS
www.flagas.com
Gasoline Retailers Association of Florida is a non-profit association representing Independent Gasoline Retailers, Convenience Stores, Gasoline Service Stations, Repair Shops, Tire Retailers, Truck Stops and Associates throughout Florida. Our goal is to improve the interests of these independent businesses and the motoring public. Cooperation with insurance companies provides benefits for our members. These benefits include money-saving programs for group health, workers' compensation, casualty and property and gasoline tank liability insurance. Benefits also include financing to purchase your gasoline station property and much more.
The problems facing our industry today affect every dealer, no matter how large or small. And, since no one individual could possibly begin to solve these problems alone, it remains that each should join in a collective effort to protect his/her business investment.
Join the Gasoline Retailers Association of Florida and help in the fight to keep the
Motor Fuel Marketing Practices Act of Florida (Below Cost) law.
Make an important investment in your business future for less than $1 a day.
Now that the New Year is here and looking back we have a lot of work to do
Join the Gasoline Retailers Association of Florida and be part of the team and protect your investment and life savings. Don’t expect someone else to explain your side of the issues in the gasoline industry to our elected officials; you can be sure that the someone else will be the Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Costco, BJ’s, oil companies etc. Together your voice should be loud and clear. Wal-Mart & Murphy Oil will be at it again to repeal Motor Fuel Marketing Practices Act of Florida (Below Cost). We have to inform our legislators, especially the newly elected ones.
Pat Moricca
Many member benefits; health insurance, worker compensation dividend (7% dividend on paid premiums last year), insurance, gasoline suppliers to mention a few. For information check our web site www.flagas.com
Dues are less than $1 a day.
Join the Gasoline Retailers Association of Florida and help Keep Below Cost law
Membership!
To fully understand the importance of membership for our elected officials, let’s look back upon the successes of the last few years. The Gasoline Retailers Association of Florida in partnership with the Florida Petroleum Marketers Association successfully lobbied against a law that would allow Below Cost Selling. Permitting Below Cost Selling would have cost each of you thousands of dollars and put many of you out of businesses.
In Florida, almost every year Wal-Mart / Murphy Oil along with the Hypermarketers, Big Box retailers and the Oil Companies have been trying to repeal Motor Fuel Marketing Practices
Act of Florida (Below Cost).
Our voices in Tallahassee must be loud and clear to inform our legislators that without Below Cost; gasoline prices will increase with less competition and small gasoline station owners will be forced out of business. It takes a lot of time, energy and money to battle Wal-Mart / Murphy Oil and others (Oil Companies etc.) to keep the Motor Fuel Marketing Practices Act of Florida (Below Cost) law in Florida.
Join the Gasoline Retailers Association of Florida and help in the fight to keep the Motor Fuel Marketing Practices Act of Florida (Below Cost) Law. Make an important investment in your business future and join the Gasoline Retailers Association of Florida (dues are less than $1 a day).
Underground gasoline storage tank Deadline
By early December, 84-85% of the state's 8,814 gas stations had the work completed, the Department Environmental Protection (DEP) Burns said. But that means 1,397 stations are not yet verified as upgraded.
"This is not as good as we hoped it would be," Burns said. "We think a lot of it has to do with the economy. We thought we would have 90-95% compliance."
Industry experts predict 5-18% of stations won't be legally selling gas on Jan. 1. The state law is aimed at protecting the state's groundwater supply from pollution.
Florida gasoline station owners are rushing to get their underground fuel storage tanks replaced with double-walled tanks by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's Dec. 31 deadline in an effort to avoid fines or a court-ordered shutdown of their gasoline pumps. If station owners have a binding contract and complete the upgrade by March 31, then the fines will not be enforced, noted Bill Burns, environmental administrator at the DEP.
Those who waited until the last minute face a deadline in the midst of a tough economy where it's hard to make a profit because of increased overall expenses is making it hard to gain financing. Loans of $100,000 to $300,000 don't make sense for marginal stations to upgrade and rural areas, where customers need them most, are most likely to close due to lack of funds.
Stations in violation will be in trouble beginning Jan. 4, when the DEP will check on gasoline stations not known to have upgraded their tanks. The state could levy fines of up to $10,000 per violation, and ultimately a court could order a station to shut off its pumps. "We will seek whatever means necessary to get them into compliance," Burns said. If the work is not completed, under way or under contract by the deadline, tanks must be drained and the operator has two years to remove them.
Federal Gas Tax Hike on Front Burner?
Five-cent increase "essential," says House Transportation Committee chairman
Washington -- Sentiment is growing at the federal level that raising the gasoline tax by at least five cents a gallon and indexing it to inflation is vital to getting long-delayed projects off the ground, reported The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. But for now, the hard part is just getting an audience in Congress, the report said.
The Obama administration favors reforming transportation funding and increasing investment in new projects such as high-speed rail but wants to delay the matter by 18 months, said the report. Members of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee are balking at that delay and demanding a debate now.
U.S. Representative Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), a committee member, predicted that new highway funding sources would be made available "in the next couple of months." One possibility is another round of stimulus money for transportation projects. "We have finally gotten the Senate and the administration to understand that transportation is key, and it's bipartisan," Brown said Monday after giving a speech to Irving leaders, according to the newspaper.
U.S. Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), the committee's chairman, has said during previous visits to Dallas-Fort Worth that a gasoline tax increase of at least five cents would be essential, said the report. Oberstar is the author of a six-year transportation bill (H.R. 3617, the Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009), introduced in June, that, if approved by Congress, would authorize spending $550 billion on transportation needs and would double the amount available for new road work, the report said.
Oberstar has said funding for the six-year program would fall about $140 billion short if the 18.4-cent federal tax remains the same, added a report by The Star-Ledger in New Jersey.
The 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gasoline tax has not been increased since 1993.
Texas Eyes Gasoline Taxes
A 10-cent per gallon state motor fuels tax increase would be the state’s first increase since 1991.
Fort Worth, TX – The momentum to push for a Texas 10 cents per gallon state motor fuels tax increase is building, the Star-Telegram reports.
Texas currently taxes gasoline at 20 cents per gallon, a tax unchanged since 1991.
One proposal has the state tax indexing to the state's inflation rate, meaning that it would increase in tandem with a selected measure of the overall cost of living. Such a move would prevent the erosion of its buying power, which state officials maintain has been diminished currently by nearly one-third.
The current state tax is projected to generate $6.3 billion during the next two years, with nearly $1.6 billion going to state agencies for purposes other than road maintenance. Another proposal would look to devote more money to transportation, which would come via higher state gasoline taxes.
Any tax increase would face significant state opposition, including Governor Rick Perry. His expected opponent in next year's Republican primary, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, has not offered a transportation plan.
By 2012, the state Transportation Department is expected to run out of money other than what it can borrow to build new roads, a significant obstacle to diverting funds from the state tax.
'Big Oil' vs. the 'Little Guys'
Dealers anxious over majors' practice of selling off retail outlets
New York -- "Big Oil" is having trouble with some of its "little guys," according to The Wall Street Journal. Dozens of gas station dealers are lodging complaints with the major petroleum refiners over changes big producers want to make in the way they do business, it said.
Some oil companies including ExxonMobil, BP and Shell want to stop owning and leasing their own retail outlets, which some of them have said they regard as a low-profit business. They have been selling the properties, often to fuel distributors, who are becoming the dealers' new franchisers.
But many of the small-business dealers who run those stations are worried about their livelihoods, said the report. Under the previous business model, refiners often gave dealers allowances and rebates on fuel prices. But when the station is sold to a third party, such as a fuel distributor, the distributor may mark up the price of fuel in order to recoup costs, it said. The station is contractually obligated to sell only their refiner's brand of fuel, so it has no choice but to buy it from the distributor who owns that brand's supply contracts and is now frequently also his franchiser (called captive buyer).
The price they pay for fuel is among the dealers' chief concerns, the report said. Two Chicago-area station operators, Robert W. Juckniess and Nrupesh Desai, who bought 17 stations from BP in the Chicago-northern Indiana market, recently sued BP, alleging they did not disclose before they bought the station franchises that BP might transfer their fuel-supply contracts to jobbers, or distributor middlemen, which it subsequently did. The result, the plaintiffs allege in their federal district-court filing in Chicago, was marked-up fuel prices that made them less competitive and their profit projections unrealistic, forcing them on many days "to lose money on every gallon of gasoline sold at the pump...in order to remain reasonably competitive on the street." The dealers' attorney, Carmen Caruso of Stahl Cowen Crowley Addis LLC in Chicago, told the paper that the lawsuit is "a matter of survival" for the station operators, who committed themselves to a 20-year franchises that prevent them from changing brands.
In court papers BP denied all of the allegations but declined further comment, said the report. ExxonMobil was named in another fuel-pricing lawsuit brought in New Jersey earlier this month. It alleges that the refiner deliberately manipulates the prices its New Jersey dealers pay for its gasoline, so as to increase revenues to the detriment of the dealers. The complaint also says that some dealers pay more for gasoline than others, depending on what part of the state they are in (that’s called zone pricing).The Exxon spokesperson told the paper that "ExxonMobil sets its wholesale price on a number of factors that are designed to allow our dealers to compete with competitors in their local trade area." As to the lawsuit, the spokesperson said Exxon does not comment on pending litigation other than to say they will defend themselves "vigorously."
Marc J. Gross, an attorney with Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith & Davis LLP, Roseland, N.J., who filed the lawsuit on behalf of nearly 100 Exxon franchisees-dealers, said such suits present a risk to the small-business people bringing them. Besides taking on a deep-pockets adversary able to carry on court battles for years, "it's like biting the hand that feeds you," he told the paper.
The issue in L.M.P. Service, Inc. v. Shell Oil Co. was whether the supplier could impose a long-term supply agreement to the franchisee as a condition to its offer of sale. The court's answer was a resounding "no".
Eastern Withdrawal for Chevron
Following review, company will shift focus from East to West Coast, Southeast
San Ramon, Calif. -- After review of its U.S. portfolio, Chevron has decided to withdraw its motor fuels operations in some areas of the eastern United States, including Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, New Jersey, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., and parts of Tennessee. Approximately 1,100 independently owned and operated retail stations will be debranded.
The San Ramon, Calif.-based company said that it expect all of the stations to continue operating under other brands and to have programs in place to assist retailers with the transition. It expected to complete the planned market exits by mid-year 2010.
Circle K Launches Franchise Program in Florida
Tampa, Fla. -- Circle K is breaking new ground this year by offering franchise opportunities to business owners in Florida who recognize the value of the Circle K brand. Circle K currently boasts more than 450 convenience stores in Florida, which the retailer said bring convenience and quality products to the marketplace, offering a one-of-a kind shopping experience designed for today's on-the-go consumer.
In a news release issued, Circle K noted its stores have established a long-standing tradition of convenience and quality that drives traffic, creates customer loyalty and provides an unparalleled retail opportunity for potential franchisees.
"Circle K is committed to building long-term value for franchisees by offering one of the most competitive retailing systems in the world," Lisa Geyer, director of franchise development and operations for the company, said in a statement.
According to the franchisor, Circle K's leading position in the Florida market creates a host of efficiencies, such as marketing, financing, support and training for franchisees. Franchising with Circle K provides c-store operators brand recognition and superior buying power. In addition, the Circle K Franchise Program offers proven business systems, extensive training and effective promotional tools. The ongoing business support and expertise of the Circle K staff, combined with the heritage of more than half a century in the c-store industry, bring franchisees "the Circle K advantage."