THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 29, 1995 TAG: 9510280300
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE HUDSON, LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
If you want to complain to Virginia's consumer-protection watchdogs about telemarketing fraud, shady home-repair deals or other scams, you'll have to do it on your own nickel.
This summer the state's consumer office shut down its toll-free hot line - which had been getting about 3,000 citizen calls a month.
Gov. George F. Allen didn't fund the hot line in his state budget proposal last winter, and a Democratic bill to restore funding for the ``800'' number failed to move beyond a General Assembly subcommittee.
Carlton Courter, state commissioner of agriculture and consumer services, says the consumer hot line ``was just not a priority with the agency.''
The agency pulled the plug on July 1.
The hot line's shutdown comes as the state is also making deep cuts in jobs and money dedicated to enforcing consumer laws.
Del. Mitchell Van Yahres - a Charlottesville Democrat who tried unsuccessfully to get the consumer hotline restored - charges that the Allen administration has little concern for fighting false advertising and other marketplace misconduct. He says its attitude is ``consumer beware - consumer be damned.''
Courter, who heads the consumer office's parent agency, the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, says the state is still committed to protecting consumers. He says the entire department is ``re-engineering'' to better serve its customers - consumers and farmers alike.
``I'm not running or shirking those responsibilities toward consumer protection,'' Courter says.
Courter notes that the hot line's survival had been shaky even during Democratic administrations. It was cut off in late 1990 under then-Gov. Douglas Wilder. But it was resurrected in July 1994 after Van Yahres and other Democratic legislators put in specific funding. The hot line costs about $70,000 a year to run.
Courter says the hot-line shutoff won't hurt the state's overall efforts to fight fraud and other marketplace wrongdoing. He says the consumer office still has two regular phone lines coming in - which were already taking nearly three-quarters of the calls to the agency.
But consumer activists complain that the loss of the hot line and other cuts at the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services have gutted what was already a tiny consumer-protection force.
A study released last month by the Virginia Citizens Consumer Coalition reported that the department plans to reduce its number of consumer-affairs positions - which totaled 27 before Allen's election - to 13 by next summer.
The report says the agency's cuts will leave consumers more vulnerable to shady operators.
Asked about the figures on consumer staff cuts in the advocacy group's report, Courter says, ``I'm not going to contest that - but it's something of a moving target.'' He expects the final total for consumer staffing to be closer to 15 than 13.
During the current round of budget reductions, the consumer office will take about a 35 percent cut in staff. Overall, the agriculture department will lose 14 percent of its work force.
``We've made hard decisions in all areas,'' Courter says. ``We've shared that pain across the whole agency.'' by CNB