During my interview Monday with Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, we discussed his early political activities that supported tax increases related to education.

Poizner supported Prop 39 in 2000, something he admitted to me as a mistake, “I personally bit my lip and voted for 39′s lowering of the tax threshold.” Prop 39 passed and has been responsible for an increase in property taxes of upwards of $40 billion for California citizens. There is no running from this fact for Commissioner Steve Poizner, and he is carefully choosing his words to describe his support of such a damaging measure.

As it relates to another tax increase measure he was said to be supportive of in 2004, Steve Poizner may be free and clear, but earlier this week it was anything but clear.

Due to Steve Poizner’s great concern surrounding education, he created a political action board named EdVoice in 2001. EdVoice was a bipartisan advocacy group that eventually represented more tax increases for educational spending, an ideology that lead to the creation of Prop 88.

The grevious sin of EdVoice rests with the creation of ’88; it called for a $500 million property tax increase ‘per year’ on Californians. Thankfully, it did not pass in 2006.

Steve Poizner’s campaign has had a harder time explaining his relationship with EdVoice. Poizner has stated that he was against Prop 88, so much so that he spoke to the EdVoice board (his own board) and told them of his concerns and eventually resigned from the post before ’88 was fully developed.

Team Whitman has taken him to task on this answer; asking when he resigned, how he resigned and if he actually did resigned before Prop 88 was defeated at the ballot.

Then there was this week’s 24-hour “scrubbing” of EdVoice.

After I placed Monday’s piece on Steve Poizner at HOGUE NEWS – and ahead of my in-studio interview with Poizner on 1380 KTKZ – the Poizner Campaign website did what is called a “scrubbing” of Poizner’s bio page.

In essence, they removed any mention of EdVoice from his bio, while EdVoice remained on Steve’s bio page for Insurance Commissioner. At that point the questions began to mount.

The matter surfaced in Wednesday’s the Contra Costa Times:

The problem for him is that his previous life as a moderate who considered taxes as a way to improve education is making it hard for conservative talk radio hosts and red-state bloggers — and presumably grass-roots followers — to swallow Poizner’s newfound conservative pitch.

“I absolutely do not buy his sudden fiscal conservatism,” conservative blogger Warner Todd Huston said. “His entire history suggests otherwise.”

Poizner’s campaign went so far as to erase a passage earlier this month from his campaign Web site indicating his association with EdVoice, an education advocacy group he cofounded in 2006 that backed a losing ballot initiative, Proposition 88. The measure would have raised parcel taxes by $500 million.

Poizner, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, insists that he had resigned from the EdVoice advisory board over his opposition to the parcel tax, an assertion backed by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who cofounded EdVoice.

The Poizner campaign, blaming the Web site scrubbing on a young staff member, restored the EdVoice reference Wednesday to his campaign biographical section.

So, it has been a week of researching EdVoice.

The srubbing of EdVoice reveals that even Poizner’s own staff had some concerns about his association, process of resignation and the damage that Prop 88 could hold for the commissioner’s message of being a fiscal conservative.

After a week of education on EdVoice, Poizner may not have to worry so much.

It seems that Steve Poizner’s “fiscal cosnervative evolution” may have started with his resignation from EdVoice. Steve Poizner’s answers are lining up with the facts, his resignation from EdVoice happened as he says it happened.

EdVoice was formed in 2001, not in 2004, and it was created soon after the passing of Prp 39. But this time Poizner was not willing to bite his lip as he did in 2000 with Prop 39, he left his post instead. 

From a reliable source, Steve Poizner never called a meeting of the board when Prop 88 was drafted – he had already left the board by then. He was less involved in EdVoice in 2004 as he was running for State Assembly, and he stopped his involvement entirely in 2005 when he began his run for insurance commissioner.

Steve Poizner wasn’t supportive or even involved in the Prop 88 development.

There are records that report that Poizner was never at any of the meetings that EdVoice held in detailing Prop 88. And Steve wasn’t at the board meeting where they decided to move forward with the measure.  

As it goes, Poizner pretty much fell off the EdVoice radar after his assembly run in 2004.

So as it stands today, EdVoice – now returned to the personal bio page of Steve Poizner – can stay.

Poizner’s creation of EdVoice is factual, as is his resignation from the board ‘ahead’ of EdVoice’s crafting of another Proposition leading to further tax increases for California is true. Steve Poizner did resign from EdVoice before they crafted Prop 88, and he removed himself entirely from the funding, process and oversight of Prop 88 in 2004.