Assemblyman Delays Key Vote on Fabric Board’s Fate

Facing near-certain defeat, Assemblyman Ross Johnson (R-La Habra) Monday postponed for a week a crucial committee vote on his bill to abolish the state board that regulates dry cleaners.

“I can count, and I can read faces as well as the next guy,” Johnson said, just before the Senate Business and Professions Committee was going to vote on his bill to abolish the Board of Fabric Care.

The delay was granted after an hour-long hearing that featured bitter exchanges between critics and defenders of the obscure board that licenses and inspects the state’s 6,000 dry cleaning establishments.

Getting in the last word, committee Chairman Joseph Montoya (D-Whittier), an opponent of the bill, accused Johnson of “effete snobbery.”

“I’m not going to sit here and let you pick apart a working people’s board,” added Montoya, who accused Johnson of rejecting a potential compromise.

Denies Compromise

Johnson, who set out to abolish the board after an elderly Anaheim dry cleaner was jailed last year for what Johnson insists was an inadvertent licensing violation, said after the hearing that he knows of no potential compromise with the bill’s opponent.

He “was just grandstanding,” Johnson said of Montoya.

If Johnson’s bill became law, it would mark the first time ever that California lawmakers voted to abolish a licensing board the Legislature had created.

Six previous attempts to abolish the Fabric Care Board, including efforts by former governors Edmund G. Brown Jr. and Ronald Reagan, have all failed.

Although the board does not license members of a profession for which extensive training is required, it provides important protections and consumer education, Montoya and other board supporters say.

In addition, supporters say the board polices the handling and disposal of toxic solvents used in dry cleaning.

But Johnson and other critics say all those functions can be handled adequately by other agencies.

Johnson noted that the board is the nation’s only state agency regulating dry cleaners.

The Dry Cleaning Board of Oklahoma, the last state besides California to regulate dry cleaners, went out of existence last week.

To keep his bill alive, Johnson needs approval by Montoya’s committee, which last year killed an almost identical measure by Sen. Leroy Greene (D-Carmichael).