Regulators Need Enough Money to Get Job Done

When Sacramento wants to demonstrate its concern for California’s ever-increasing number of consumers, it usually focuses on expenditures for highways, railways and schools--not on regulatory boards, bureaus and commissions.

That’s natural. A proposed high-speed rail line between north and south, a new freeway to the Inland Empire, a University of California campus in Merced all seem important and worthy of support.

But so too are other, less sexy improvements.

In recent months, when I have written about such obscure entities as the Board of Pharmacy, the Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education and the Seismic Safety Commission, I’ve felt that these activities, too, should be well staffed and funded.

Often, despite some moves in the new Davis administration, they are not yet being properly supported. In the Wilson administration, some were allowed to atrophy.

Complaints roll in and often aren’t dealt with in a timely manner. Yet stringent regulation is an important assurance of the quality of California life.

The good news is, doing what needs to be done won’t break us. The funds needed are not all that substantial.

We are talking possibly $200 million more for the 30 bureaus and boards in the Department of Consumer Affairs, and Gov. Gray Davis’ next total budget, $88.1 billion, is more than 400 times larger than that amount.

Much of the financing now comes from fees from professionals who are licensed. But Davis payments out of the general fund for the Consumer Affairs Department actually would go down $23.9 million in the next fiscal year, according to an overview presented by a state Senate committee.

Take the Board of Pharmacy, for example. I spent three hours with its executive officer, Patricia Harris, and her assistant, Virginia Herold, last Friday. Harris has been with the board 18 years, 10 as its chief.

She and the 11 board members have been under fire for not doing their jobs well or fining violators enough. But even the facts as presented by Harris and Herold themselves are pretty dismal.

The board, with an annual budget of $6 million, has a policy of conducting routine inspections at each of the state’s 6,000 pharmacies once every three years.

But because of a shortage of inspectors, there have been virtually no such inspections since 1996.

Harris said the board has 19 authorized inspectors, two supervisors and a part-timer. There are eight vacancies, which isn’t new.

Under these circumstances, the number of inspectors is adequate only to investigate complaints, which numbered 1,073 in the past fiscal year. About one-third of these involved pharmaceutical misorders, which can have deadly results.

In 1992, early in the Wilson years, the Pharmacy Board asked the Department of Finance to authorize 22 more inspectors, up from 13. It did grant six more, but, as of now, because of the vacancies, there has been no increase in the total number of inspectors.

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This year, under the Davis administration, a 20% salary increase has been authorized for the inspectors, who are all pharmacists themselves, bringing their salaries to $70,000 a year. That might help, and there have been recent hiring interviews. But disputes have long led to turnovers and litigation.

Harris and Herold portrayed the Department of Finance in both administrations as very distant. Invariably, they said, they can talk only to junior personnel.

Even now, in the new administration, they added, the Pharmacy Board has been unsuccessful in getting the Finance Department to allow it timely use of its accumulated reserves, now approaching $9 million. Recently, the reserves reached such a level that the board decided to reduce its fees from $5.8 million to $4.4 million a year.

Herold summed up the situation this way: “Consumer affairs as a whole is generally viewed [in Sacramento] as superfluous.”

But, she and Harris said, they are doing the best they can with the resources they have, and now have 250 cases at the attorney general’s office for prosecution, exceeding their $523,000 budget for this item this year by more than $330,000.

Herold estimated that everything her board needs could be met by an annual budget increase of $4.5 million, at first coming out of the reserves.

I asked Sandy Harrison, spokesman for the Department of Finance, for comment.

“The Board of Pharmacy has not been singled out for any harsh treatment,” he contended.

“In this current year, they did pretty well in terms of getting just about everything they wanted in inspectors’ salaries. In the past, one of the things that’s worked against them is the large number of vacancies. The Department of Finance is traditionally reluctant to approve funding for new positions when existing positions are sitting vacant.”

Harrison said that senior finance officials review what junior members decide on requests.

As for Herold’s remark that consumer affairs are viewed as superfluous, Harrison said, “That’s certainly not true now. We can’t speak to prior administrations.”

My attempts to reach Aileen Adams, secretary of State and Consumer Affairs in the Davis administration, for comment on the remark about being “superfluous” were unsuccessful. The call I got back was from Lynn Morris, deputy director for board relations at the Department of Consumer Affairs.

Morris said, “It doesn’t feel that way [superfluous]. We license 1.5 million people [in all bureaus and boards]. We have a really big part in the way professions are regulated. My job doesn’t feel like it’s superfluous. Maybe, we don’t get on the front page of the newspaper, but we’re working on it.”

I don’t know about the front page. I just wish they’d spend a little more money, hire a few more inspectors and do their job better for the people of California.

Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventures at (213) 237-7060 or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com.