Problem solved! It's the reed relay in the APC board.
The relay was not failed open or short. It had some resistance while open. Because it's in parallel with the meter it was not easy to diagnose. If you check between pins 30 and 31 of the tuner board side by side with a working receiver the only clue was that the ohm reading takes a few seconds to stabilize on the bad unit, like a charging cap.
It all makes sense now. Last year I thought the transistors that drive the relay were bad. I grounded the collector of Q27 on the tuner board, forcing the relay on the APC board to close. I checked the rest of the circuit and the signals that drive the relay circuit seemed ok so I replaced the transistor and the circuit was operational again. What I had actually done is exercise the relay, in doing so broke the high resistance while open condition temporarily. This is why when I checked the transistors that were removed on the bench they were OK.
Why does the meter slam to the left in this condition? The relay serves two functions, one is to shunt the meter once quartz lock is enabled. The other is to complete the PLL circuit once the conditions of fine tune, no mute and no hand on the knob have been satisfied. If the relay contacts for the meter have resistance when open the quadrature tank circuit will be un balanced causing the PA3001 to believe that the tank circuit is greater than 70 KHz away from the tuned frequency, causing the mute function to stay high. Pin 7 is also trying to drive current, causing the pin to hit VCC making the meter slam.
To anyone in the future that has a problem with the meter being slammed to one side (especially the left) remove the blue wire on pin 5 under the APC board. This will remove the relay from being paralleled with the meter. In this condition the touch lock sensor, fine tune, stereo and quartz lock led's should work.
I am working on a small daughter card to hold a modern reed relay to replace the original. You could always dead bug one in place.
I would recommend that in the future whenever a service or full recap of a 1980 is completed that this part be replaced. When you look at what it is doing for both sets of contacts in the circuit it could cause a performance problem that may be difficult to detect. The relay may somehow become damaged when the power supply fails as well. It is very cheap insurance.