Optometry Board Can’t See Eye to Eye

It has come to this: A professional mediator will chair the feuding state Board of Optometry’s next meeting--if its six members stop bickering over the date, time and format long enough for the healing to begin.

For more than a year, infighting has prevented the 89-year-old panel from convening regularly.

As optometrists and their patients wait in vain for the board to address a growing list of issues--among them, mandatory release of contact lens prescriptions and new rules for glaucoma treatment--frustrated state lawmakers are threatening to disband it and return its functions to the state Department of Consumer Affairs.

“I’m fed up,” said Sen. Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont), chairwoman of the legislative committee deciding the board’s fate.

“They’re very dysfunctional. They’re a 10 on a scale where 10 is the worst.”

The board’s gridlock began simply enough, with numbers.

Charged with licensing and disciplining more than 7,700 California specialists who conduct eye exams, the board until mid-2000 had a full complement of nine members: a super-majority of six professional optometrists, offset by three members of the public.

The lay members say they often felt marginalized, their efforts to participate stymied or ignored.

“As soon as anyone questioned any of the professional members’ opinions, they got angry,” said Jane Vogel, an Irvine-based activist for the blind and visually impaired who has served on the board since 1996.

“They would say we’re not going to discuss that, it’s already decided. Everything was already decided.”

The power balance swung, however, when Gov. Gray Davis did not replace the three professionals whose terms have expired since he took office.

With optometrists and non-optometrists now evenly matched, three to three, and 100% meeting attendance legally required to conduct official business, the public members have used their newfound clout to air long-held grievances.

Many dealt with administrative slights, real or perceived.

They griped that the board president--a professional member for at least a decade--always assigned fellow professionals the plums among the board’s eight one-member committees, relegating lay members to duds like Credentials, an inactive panel whose purpose remains somewhat mysterious.

“They keep telling me I’m on Credentials, but I think maybe it doesn’t exist,” said Sunil “Sunny” Aghi, an Orange County businessman and Democratic Party activist on the board since 1998.

On a more serious note, the public members also accused their professional counterparts of placing industry interests above consumer protection by not supporting the attorney general’s false-marketing lawsuit against eyeglass retailer Pearle Vision.

Led by Vogel, they protested the dearth of training requirements in a board-endorsed 2000 law that expanded optometrists’ scope of practice, allowing them to treat a form of glaucoma and to delegate some tasks to unlicensed assistants.

“This board has been a total club to protect professionals,” Aghi said. “Nobody has been looking out for the consumers’ interests.”

The board’s optometrist members vehemently deny this, saying quality eye care has always been their priority.

“This board has been so fair,” said board President Gerald Easton, a Coronado optometrist appointed in 1994.

“I know of no situation where we’ve been protective against the interests of consumers. The board certainly isn’t a rubber stamp for the California Optometric Assn.”

Except for an emergency conference in August, the board--which used to gather quarterly--has not held a full meeting since December 2000, canceling four scheduled dates. The professionals say the public members are using absence as a power tactic.

“If you’ve got problems, don’t just not show up or talk behind my back,” said Steven Grant, a Costa Mesa optometrist on the board since 1994. “This is like sandbox fighting.”

Public members counter that they have stayed home only when they were denied equal opportunity to propose items for discussion or were given inadequate time to analyze issues.

“I don’t see myself as boycotting at all,” said Patricia Gee, a retired educator on the board since 1994. “Why can’t we have input?”

The optometry board’s escalating hostilities spilled into public view late last year, when it came up for its regular four-year check by Sen. Figueroa’s Joint Legislative Sunset Review Committee.

After an angry dispute over whether to approve a staff-written report recommending the board continue unchanged, the lay members submitted their own 12-point issue paper, which suggested that the board be reconfigured to have five professional and four public members, or maybe even a public-member majority.

Figueroa said she was leaning toward eliminating the board entirely, saying she would not play referee to its factions.

“I don’t take sides,” she said. “I just know [the board] is not fulfilling its statutory responsibility.”

All six board members say they plan to attend the mediator-led session March 18.

“I would love to hear their ideas,” Sheilah Titus, the board’s vice president and an optometrist in El Dorado Hills, said about the lay members.

“That doesn’t mean I won’t fight the good fight. I love a good argument and I’ve had disagreements with professionals on the board too. But I think they feel belittled by us and I don’t understand why.”

Still, the two sides have already exchanged tense memos arguing about the meeting’s date: whether all board members were consulted equally about the date, whether some members mischaracterized other members’ availability on the date and whether members could have other members removed from the board for not appearing.

Subsequently, the date was changed.

“Our organization looks at more than 25 California boards and this one is the most messed up,” said Julianne D’Angelo Fellmeth, administrative director of UC San Diego Law School’s Center for Public Interest Law. “This board can’t even agree on a date to meet.”