Consumer Aid Agency Hires New Director

A new director has been hired for Ventura County’s consumer watchdog agency to replace William “Bill” Korth, who is retiring from his job as “sealer” of the Department of Weights and Measures after 25 years.

Dan Riley, who holds a similar position in Riverside County, has been hired to take over Korth’s job on Nov. 10.

County supervisors approved Riley’s appointment on Tuesday.

Sealer, or chief inspector, is the official title conferred on heads of county weights and measures departments by the state.

“It literally comes from putting a seal, or our sticker, on a gas pump or a produce scale to show we’ve inspected and OKd it,” said Korth.

The county’s Department of Weights and Measures has two primary goals: to protect consumers from dishonest business practices and to protect business from dishonest competitors.

The department has five inspectors who travel the county with tape measures, scales, stopwatches, price-scanning equipment and fabric measuring rulers to check the accuracy of the weight, volume, length or size of any product consumers pay for.

The inspectors check the county’s gas pumps to verify that they’re pumping the amount and quality of gas they should be.

They use their tape measures to double check that 50-foot garden hoses aren’t 49 feet, and that no one is being shorted on 25-foot rolls of aluminum foil or 260-sheet rolls of paper towels.

They’ll pour a diet Coke into a measuring cup to see if it comes up to the 12-ounce line. They’ll peer into a cereal box to find out if Kellogg in fact put in two scoops of raisins if the box says it does.

“During the 1980s, Korth and his inspectors successfully forced Nabisco to stop deceptively packaging brownies in packages that made it look like you were getting a lot more brownie than you actually were,” said Steve Riley, deputy director of the county’s Resource Management Agency. Nabisco had to pay a $250,000 fine to Ventura County on that one.

Consumers have benefited in other ways during Korth’s tenure, Riley said.

“Ventura County has one of the lowest [bar code] scanner error rates in the United States as a result of Bill’s stringent inspection policies,” Riley said. “I think in our grocery stores it’s only 2%, which is very low.”