Reed Royalty, President & CEO

Reed Royalty’s years of experience in college, in the Navy, in the private sector, and around government fuel his passion for fulfilling OCTax’s mission:  to make taxes and tax-supported government programs “fair, understandable, cost effective, and good for business.”

A Navy ROTC honors graduate of Harvard, his first jobs were as a surface ship executive officer and a submarine engineer officer.  He was ranked in the top one percent of Navy shiphandlers.  “That must be applicable to the stormy waters of legislation and lobbying,” he jokes.  His thesis that won his Master’s Degree in Business Administration was on something mysteriously called “contingency content analysis of public testimony” that revealed how people think about relationships between government and regulated companies. 

He was AT&T’s lobbyist to the California State Legislature.  He never lost a bill in his years in Sacramento.  He attributes that to his reputation as a person who “tells the truth, all the time.”  He says, “The worst thing a lobbyist can do is tell a legislator less than the whole truth about a bill, even when some of the facts work in the opposition’s favor.”   

He served AT&T as Southern California area vice president, founding vice president of AirTouch Cellular (now Verizon Wireless) and a founder of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association in Washington D.C.  He negotiated nationwide partnerships of cellular companies, creating the industry we know today.  He was Verizon’s principal advocate to federal, state, and local legislatures and regulatory agencies.  These experiences gave him understanding of regulatory and legislative processes. 

He is a three-time chairman of the $9 billion Orange County Employees’ Retirement System, which gives him additional insights into the costs and functions of government.  He says, “government employees are good people, absolutely equal to workers I’ve known in the private sector.  But we in the private sector sometimes are frustrated that government workers have less freedom to innovate on the job because they work under rules that are set into inflexible law.”     

Retired three times over, he was the owner and president of Reed Royalty Public Affairs Inc., a government relations firm with multiple clients in the counties of Orange and San Diego.  He chaired the campaign for the Measure M sales tax for transportation in Orange County. 

He says, “I don’t like most taxes, but Measure M is a good one.  It’s fair, because everyone pays it.  It’s understandable, because we know exactly what we get for our money.  It’s cost effective, because our Transportation Authority generally builds things on time and on budget.  And it’s good for the economy, because commerce depends on good transportation.” 

In 1986, he was one of the founders of OCTax.  “It’s more a hobby than a job.  I’d do it for free.”