The 2009 terminations · Reference · TFR-2026-08

The Committee to Restore Dealer Rights, 2008–2011: what the campaign was, and what it got

First published 2026-08-05 · Last substantively revised 2026-08-05

The Committee to Restore Dealer Rights stopped publishing in December 2009. It does not exist today, and The Franchise Record is not the Committee, is not its successor and speaks for none of the people who ran it — this publication acquired the domain the campaign once used, in 2026, and has republished none of its material. What follows is the campaign’s history from the public record: three dealers, one bill that never got a vote, a hearing room, and an arbitration statute passed eight days after the compromise that produced it was announced.

§1 Who it was

¶Three franchised dealers ran it, and all three are on the record as its co-chairs. The campaign’s own About page — preserved in Internet Archive captures from June 2009 through November 2013 — gives three names and, for each, a trade. Jack Fitzgerald is given as the owner of Fitzgerald Auto Malls, a group with stores in three states. Alan Spitzer is given as the owner of the Ohio group that carries his family name. Tammy Darvish is given as a vice president of the Maryland group DARCARS, and carries a second title on that page as well, which makes her the National Automobile Dealers Association’s director for Washington.1 That second title is the campaign’s own description of her and is repeated here as that, not as a finding about NADA’s staffing.

¶Trade press independent of the campaign records the same three names. A WardsAuto profile of Darvish published January 25, 2012 states flatly that “the three dealers created and became co-chairmen of the Committee to Restore Dealer Rights.”2 Automotive News, writing on August 24, 2009 while the fight was still live, called her “a founder of the independent Committee to Restore Dealer Rights.”3

¶It was an ad hoc committee in the ordinary sense, not an institution. Its archived contact page gave a postal address care of one co-chair’s management company in Elyria, Ohio; it had no separate premises of its own in the record. That page also carried a personal email address and a media telephone number, and those are deliberately not reproduced here: they are the private contact details of living people, and seventeen years is long enough.1 One further detail is worth stating precisely, because it is the sort of thing that gets rounded off. The site’s month-by-month archive list begins with a single post in November 2008, before either bankruptcy; the About page dates the Committee’s formation to the aftermath of the Chrysler and General Motors filings in 2009. Both can be true of a WordPress installation, and no source found here reconciles them.1

§2 What it asked for

¶One thing, and nothing smaller: enactment of the Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act of 2009. The About page described that as the Committee’s primary current focus, and the site’s top navigation was built around the two bill numbers — a section for S. 1304 and a section for H.R. 2743, each holding the bill text and a running cosponsor roll.1

¶Neither bill was enacted. S. 1304 was introduced by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa on June 18, 2009, drew 48 cosponsors, was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, and never moved again. H.R. 2743, the House companion, was introduced by Representative Dan Maffei of New York on June 8, 2009 and drew 286 cosponsors — with its sponsor, a majority of the House — and never received a committee vote.4 What those two bills would have done, and why a bill a majority of the House had signed never reached the floor, is set out separately in S. 1304 and H.R. 2743: one bill, two numbers, and no vote.

¶The Committee’s own cosponsor figures are treated here as campaign material rather than as citations, and the roll of record is used instead — but the figures are worth setting out, because they run the opposite way to the usual suspicion about advocacy arithmetic. The About page reports more than 202 congressional cosponsors in its capture of June 29, 2009, and more than 270 in its capture of August 29, 2009. Set those against the rolls as they stood on the same two days: 202 in the House and 7 in the Senate on June 29; 271 and 34 on August 29.4 The campaign’s headline figure for “Congressional cosponsors” was, on both dates, its House roll alone. It was leaving out a Senate roll that by late August had reached thirty-four.

¶The later figure is split by chamber and is short in both. The capture of June 1, 2010 gives 43 senators and more than 281 representatives.1 No cosponsor had joined either bill since December 8, 2009 — the last name on each was added that day, which was also the day the arbitration compromise was announced — so both rolls had been closed for almost six months when that page was written. The closed rolls are 48 and 286.4 The campaign was undercounting its own support by five names in each chamber.

¶The error does not run one way, which is the reason for the rule. The campaign’s S. 1304 section published a named Senate roll, and the capture of June 30, 2009 carries a list headed as current to June 27 with nine senators on it.1 Seven of the nine had in fact filed as cosponsors by that date. The other two, both from Florida, do not appear on the roll of record until July 6 — nine days after the date the page gave itself, and six days after the capture.4 Nothing here says the two senators had not privately committed. It says the page was not the roll, in either direction, and that is why this account uses congress.gov for every count it asserts.

§3 How it worked

¶The clearest surviving evidence of the campaign is not on its website. It is in a congressional hearing record. On July 22, 2009 the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law held the third day of its hearings on the ramifications of the auto industry bankruptcies, Serial No. 111-55. Twelve witnesses were called. The printed list opens with Chrysler’s vice president and associate general counsel alongside Kevyn Orr of Jones Day, then General Motors’ vice president and general counsel for North America, then Harvey Miller of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a bankruptcy professor, a Cato Institute analyst, the Treasurer of the State of Indiana and an injured consumer — and it closes with four terminated dealers. The first of the four was John J. Fitzgerald, president of Fitzgerald Auto Malls.5

¶He opened by naming the organisation:

I represent the Committee to Restore Dealer Rights, CRDR. We are the dealers that got dumped. We are the losers. There are 169,000 jobs that you could recreate by just passing our bill; 169,000. Plus, you would give all of your constituents better service than they are going to get.

John J. Fitzgerald, testimony, Ramifications of Auto Industry Bankruptcies (Part III), House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, July 22, 2009

¶The 169,000 figure is his, offered in testimony without a source in the record, and this publication has not been able to corroborate it; it is quoted as what the campaign told Congress, not as a finding. The rest of his testimony sets out the argument the Committee ran everywhere. It was an attack on a single proposition — that the country had too many dealers — which he told the subcommittee was “the big lie,” a phrase he said the campaign had not invented but copied. His own arithmetic against it, again as testimony rather than as verified data: when he started selling cars there were about 40,000 domestic-brand dealers and 50 million vehicles on American roads; by 2008 there were about 13,000 domestic dealers and 150 million vehicles.5

¶Sitting with him was Jim Tarbox, a former Chrysler dealer from North Kingstown, Rhode Island, who introduced himself as a former dealer because, as he put it, “just over a month ago, my two dealerships were taken from me.” His testimony is the part of this record that should be read before any generalisation about the campaign is made. He told the subcommittee he was given no justification for his selection and less than a month to close; that his family had been in the business for three generations and the dealership was founded in 1935; that he had sold 750 new Jeeps a year at 450 percent of planning potential; and that his employee count had gone from 60 to 15. He testified that he learned why he had been chosen only when an internal Chrysler email was read aloud at the bankruptcy hearing, in which the company’s northeast business center director wrote that he was “a belligerent, combative dealer to litigates and protests any new Jeep franchise in Providence, Rhode Island. Management made decision to cut him. He has not operated in good faith.”5

¶Around the hearings the Committee ran an ordinary legislative campaign. Its site carried an Action Center built for one purpose, contacting Congress: both chamber switchboard numbers, a state-by-state route to finding senators, and an alphabetical list of more than four hundred House members, each with a state, a district number and a link to that member’s own website.1

¶The rest of the site is a run of dated posts filed under News, Media and Video, and the three do different work. News carried the campaign’s own releases: one of them covers a June 10, 2009 appearance in Washington by Representatives Frank Kratovil, Steny Hoyer, Chris Van Hollen, Dan Maffei and Roscoe Bartlett alongside dealership owners, and the Video section carries the same event. Media carried other outlets’ work with the outlet credited — a July 8, 2009 item on Representative Steven LaTourette is filed there as coming from a television station in Ohio. July 2009 titles also name Senators Jay Rockefeller and Harry Reid.1 The captures establish what the campaign published, and on what date. They are not treated here as confirmation that any event happened as a title describes it. One caution goes with them, and it is the reason this paragraph reads titles rather than URLs: the stored address of the June 10 video names Representatives Bartlett, Manzullo and Fitzgerald, and the headline that address actually renders names Hoyer, Van Hollen, Kratovil, Bartlett and Maffei. A post slug on this site is not a reliable record of who was in the room.

¶The campaign was not the industry’s establishment, and one sourced disagreement inside the dealer world belongs on the record. Automotive News reported on August 24, 2009 that Darvish — the co-chair whose second title on the Committee’s own About page was a NADA one — said NADA “is conflicted and should bow out of the campaign to help rejected dealers get their franchises back.”3 That is the same sentence in which the paper calls the Committee independent, and the word is doing work. A dealer association represents the dealers who kept their franchises as well as the ones who lost them; that is the conflict, and it is why a separate committee existed at all.

§4 What it got

¶Not the bill. On December 8, 2009, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin announced legislative language that “expands the binding arbitration offer GM and Chrysler presented to dealers last week by requiring the arbitrator to balance the economic interests of the terminated dealership, the company and the general public when considering dealer reinstatement.”6 Eight days later, on December 16, 2009, that language was enacted as Section 747 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010, Public Law 111-117, 123 Stat. 3219.7

¶The distance between what was asked for and what passed is the whole story. The bills would have restored franchise agreements. Section 747 gave a defined class of dealerships the right to demand binding arbitration. One subsection then did both of the things that decided what a win was worth: it barred the arbitrator from awarding “compensatory, punitive, or exemplary damages to any party,” and it made the manufacturer’s obligation to a winning dealership the issue of a “customary and usual letter of intent to enter into a sales and service agreement” — not the return of a franchise. The American Arbitration Association’s November 2010 report to Congress counts 2,789 eligible dealerships, 1,575 filings, 166 arbitral determinations and 55 determinations for the dealership.8 The mechanism and its deadlines are set out in Section 747: who qualified, what the clock was, and what winning was worth.

¶Something else came out of that summer, and it has outlasted both bills. On July 24, 2009 the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation announced that Senator Jay Rockefeller had asked the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program to review how General Motors and Chrysler had chosen the dealerships they cut. His stated reason was that nobody could explain them: “There is substantial confusion, even among dealers themselves, as to how GM and Chrysler selected dealerships to terminate and what benefits, if any, they might gain by doing so.”9 The audit that followed, SIGTARP-10-008, published July 19, 2010, remains the fullest documentary account of the terminations in existence.10 The Committee’s archive shows it publicising the request within days. Whether the campaign prompted it is not established by any source found for this page, and is not claimed here.

§5 Why it stopped

¶The campaign’s own archive answers the question, in the negative. The February 26, 2011 capture of the site lists its months of publication in the sidebar: November 2008, then May, June, July, August, October, November and December 2009. There is no 2010 and no 2011. The site stayed up for another eighteen months after its last dated post.1

¶The site was edited at least once outside the run of dated posts. The About page is one text in the capture of August 29, 2009 and a longer one in the capture of June 1, 2010: the later version splits the cosponsor count by chamber, adds counts of the dealerships each company closed, asserts that no other group represented rejected and terminated dealers, and states that terminated dealers lost their NADA membership along with their franchises. That rewrite cannot be dated more closely than those two captures, and the window is wide enough to matter: the rewritten page’s own news list stops at December 3, 2009, which is where every other dated thing on the site stops too. Nothing here shows an edit made after the posts stopped. The page then sat unchanged through the captures of September 1, 2010 and February 26, 2011.1

§6 What happened to the address

¶What becomes of an advocacy domain after the advocacy stops is rarely documented. This one is, capture by capture, and the sequence is set out here because a reader arriving from a 2009 citation deserves to know exactly what stands between that citation and this page.

¶Two practical consequences follow for anyone checking a footnote. A citation to this address dated 2009 or 2010 pointed at the campaign. A citation dated after mid-2011 — and there are some — did not, whatever it appeared to point at. The Internet Archive holds the campaign’s pages and is the right place to read them; they are not reproduced here, and never will be. The About page explains how this publication came to hold the address.

§7 A note on method

¶This account is built from three kinds of material, kept distinct throughout. The congressional record and the enrolled statute are primary and are quoted directly. Contemporaneous trade reporting — Automotive News and WardsAuto — is labelled as trade press and used for corroboration of who ran the campaign, not for legal conclusions. Internet Archive captures are used as evidence that a page existed, on a date, saying something on a subject. Not one sentence written by the Committee is quoted from them. The single verbatim quotation taken from any archived capture on this page is a registrar’s automated expiry notice, which nobody at the campaign wrote and which is quoted because it carries the date the registration lapsed.

¶Four rules were applied while writing it, and they are stated so a reader can check whether they held. No sentence of the Committee’s prose is reproduced anywhere on this site. The personal email address and media telephone number on its archived contact page are not published. Its logo is not used. Nobody’s motives are characterised beyond what they said on the record, and where the record only supports an inference, the inference is labelled as one.

§8 Still open

¶The campaign stopped in 2009. Its argument did not. On September 4, 2024 the Ohio Ninth District Court of Appeals decided Spitzer Autoworld Akron, L.L.C. v. Fred Martin Motor Co., 2024-Ohio-3394, an appeal and cross-appeal out of the Summit County Court of Common Pleas. The appellee is an Ohio Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge dealership trading under the name of the group the campaign’s own About page gave one of its three co-chairs as the owner of; the opinion itself names no individual. Its background section is a compressed history of everything on this page: Chrysler’s 2009 bankruptcy ended Spitzer’s franchise; Section 747, enacted that December, gave it an arbitration; the arbitrator ruled in its favour in June 2010 and ordered it reinstated; New Chrysler issued the statutory letter of intent on October 1, 2010; a competing dealer filed a protest with the Ohio Motor Vehicle Dealers Board to stop the new store opening within ten miles of its own. The court’s own summary of the consequence is one sentence: that protest, “along with Chrysler’s bankruptcy in 2009 that predated Fred Martin’s protest, gave rise to years of litigation in both federal and state court.”12

¶What that litigation was finally about is worth stating plainly, because it is the arithmetic of the gap. The dealership did not sue over its franchise; Section 747 had settled that, and had barred the arbitrator from awarding it a dollar. It sued the competitor that had protested, on a 2007 contract in which the two of them had waived the right to protest each other. A Summit County jury found the contract breached and awarded $5,750,000 in compensatory damages against a claim of about $13.1 million in lost profits, and on September 4, 2024 the Ninth District affirmed, one judge of the three dissenting.12

¶So the money in this story was recovered fifteen years after the terminations, in a state contract action against another dealer, on a theory that has nothing to do with either bill the Committee asked for. The statute it got instead had already excluded that remedy by its own terms. That is the distance between restoration and arbitration, and it is why the distinction is worth keeping straight.

▪ Ceased · Committee to Restore Dealer Rights · last dated publication December 2009
▪ Died in committee · S. 1304 and H.R. 2743, 111th Congress
▪ Expired · § 747 arbitration election window · closed 2010-01-25

Endnotes

1. Internet Archive captures of hometownautodealers.org, used as evidence of what was published at the address and when. No text from those pages is reproduced on this site. Captures relied on above: the About page of June 29, 2009 (co-chairs, the Committee’s self-description, the 202 cosponsor figure, the archive list then reaching only May and June 2009), of August 29, 2009 (the 270 figure, and the archive list once November 2008 has appeared on it), of June 1, 2010 (the rewritten text and the 43-and-281 split), of September 1, 2010 (identical to the June text) and of February 26, 2011 (the same three co-chairs, the campaign’s own termination counts, the same rewritten text, and the sidebar month list ending at December 2009); the month archive for November 2008, captured July 31, 2009, which holds one post; the Action Center page captured June 30, 2009 for the two switchboard numbers and the member lists; the S. 1304 section page captured June 30, 2009, which carries the bill as introduced and a Senate cosponsor roll headed as current to June 27, 2009; the news, media and video posts of June and July 2009 for the June 10, 2009 appearance, the sourcing convention of the Media section and the slug-versus-headline mismatch; and the contact page of October 7, 2010 for the Elyria, Ohio postal address. That contact capture is deliberately not linked from here: it carries a personal email address and a media telephone number, and this page withholds both. About page, June 29, 2009 (Internet Archive) · About page, August 29, 2009 (Internet Archive) · About page, June 1, 2010 (Internet Archive) · About page, September 1, 2010 (Internet Archive) · About page, February 26, 2011 (Internet Archive) · November 2008 archive, captured July 31, 2009 (Internet Archive) · Action Center, June 30, 2009 (Internet Archive) · S. 1304 section, June 30, 2009 (Internet Archive) · Capture index (Wayback CDX API)
2. Jean Halliday, “From Dealer to Advocate to Author,” WardsAuto, January 25, 2012, for the formation of the Committee by its three co-chairs and for the description of the legislation as ultimately giving dealers the opportunity to challenge the closings in third-party arbitrations. Trade press, used for corroboration of the leadership. Profile (WardsAuto)
3. Donna Harris, “Dealership closings turn NADA into battleground,” Automotive News, August 24, 2009, for the description of Darvish as a founder of the independent Committee and for her position on NADA’s role. Trade press. Article (Automotive News)
4. S. 1304, 111th Congress, Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act of 2009, introduced June 18, 2009 by Sen. Charles Grassley, 48 cosponsors, referred to the Committee on the Judiciary; H.R. 2743, 111th Congress, same title, introduced June 8, 2009 by Rep. Daniel Maffei, 286 cosponsors, referred to the Committee on Financial Services. Sponsor, date, cosponsor and action data from congress.gov. The counts as at particular dates — 202 House and 7 Senate on June 29, 2009; 271 and 34 on August 29, 2009; the last name on each bill added December 8, 2009; and the July 6, 2009 cosponsorship dates of the two Florida senators discussed above — are computed from the dated cosponsor lists on the same two pages, which are also published as bill-status XML by the Government Publishing Office. S. 1304 (congress.gov) · H.R. 2743 (congress.gov)
5. Ramifications of Auto Industry Bankruptcies (Part III), Hearing before the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 111th Congress, 1st Session, July 22, 2009, Serial No. 111-55. Witness list; the Fitzgerald testimony quoted above and his “big lie” argument and dealer-count figures; the Tarbox testimony, including the internal Chrysler email he quoted and his account of his own dealerships. Hearing record (govinfo)
6. “Hoyer, Durbin Announce Plan to Resolve Disputes with Terminated Auto Dealers,” press release, Office of the Majority Leader, December 8, 2009, quoted for the description of the arbitration language and the balancing requirement. Press release (archived office of the Majority Leader)
7. Section 747 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010, Public Law 111-117, 123 Stat. 3219–3222, signed December 16, 2009. Both quoted phrases are in subsection (e), which carries the bar on compensatory, punitive and exemplary damages and, in the sentence after it, the requirement that a manufacturer give a winning dealership a customary and usual letter of intent within seven business days. Subsection (b) creates the right to arbitrate and subsection (d) sets the 40-day election period; subsection (g) is a savings clause for lawful terminations under state law, not the remedy provision. Public Law 111-117 (govinfo)
8. American Arbitration Association, A Report to Congress on the Automobile Industry Special Binding Arbitration Program, November 2010, for 2,789 eligible dealerships, 1,575 filings, 166 arbitral determinations and 55 determinations for the dealership. Report (PDF, ICDR)
9. U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, “Rockefeller Calls for Audit of General Motors and Chrysler Terminations,” July 24, 2009. Announcement (commerce.senate.gov)
10. Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Factors Affecting the Decisions of General Motors and Chrysler to Reduce Their Dealership Networks, SIGTARP-10-008, July 19, 2010. sigtarp.gov is offline; this publication cites the archived copy. Audit (PDF, Internet Archive)
11. Internet Archive captures of the address after the campaign, row by row: the parking page of July 17, 2011 carrying the registrar’s expiry notice, quoted above; the captures of February and July 2012 showing the “Dealers” link-injection blog, whose posts are dated from September 2011; the parking page of July 26, 2013 with the second expiry notice; the captures of November 18 to 20, 2013 showing the partial restore, with /category/s1304/ and /category/hr2743/ returning 404 while /category/news/, /category/media/ and /category/video/ returned 200; the error page of December 17, 2014 and the registrar holding page of March 3, 2016; the captures of January 2019 to January 2020 showing the home-decor site; the placeholder and default WordPress captures of March 13 and March 20, 2025; and the captures from April 4, 2025 to April 22, 2026 showing the casino affiliate site. The gap between January 2020 and March 2025 is a gap in the archive, and is described as one. Capture dates and status codes are from the Wayback CDX index for the domain. Parking page, July 17, 2011 (Internet Archive) · “Dealers” blog, February 2, 2012 (Internet Archive) · Parking page, July 26, 2013 (Internet Archive) · Restored About page, November 18, 2013 (Internet Archive) · Home-decor site, March 22, 2019 (Internet Archive) · Empty install, March 13, 2025 (Internet Archive) · Last capture before this publication, April 22, 2026 (Internet Archive)
12. Spitzer Autoworld Akron, L.L.C. v. Fred Martin Motor Co., 2024-Ohio-3394, Ninth District Court of Appeals, Summit County, C.A. Nos. 30624 and 30643, decided September 4, 2024, on appeal from Summit County Court of Common Pleas Case No. CV-2020-09-2564. Paragraphs 3 and 10 to 16 for the termination effective June 9, 2009, the Section 747 arbitration decision of June 2010, the letter of intent of October 1, 2010, the protest, and the quoted sentence on years of litigation; paragraph 7 for the May 17, 2007 agreement in which each dealer waived the right to protest the other; paragraph 37 for the jury’s finding of breach, the $13.1 million lost-profits claim and the $5,750,000 compensatory award; the first paragraph for the disposition, and paragraphs 75 to 78 for the dissent of one member of the three-judge panel. The opinion cites Chrysler Group LLC v. Fox Hills Motor Sales, Inc., 776 F.3d 411, 422–423 (6th Cir. 2015) for the letter of intent as the sole remedy. Opinion (PDF, Supreme Court of Ohio reporter of decisions)

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