The House room in the Des Moines Capitol Building on March 9, 2001. (Sourcemedia Group)

Two of three Iowans favor creating a state government board to handle citizen complaints about violations of Public Records and Open Meetings laws, according to statewide survey results released Wednesday.

The survey found most Iowans know little about the state’s Public Records and Open Meetings laws, but nevertheless value more openness than is practiced.

The poll results reveal “an overwhelming amount of support from people for open and transparent government,” said Kathleen Richardson, executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, which commissioned the poll.

“The citizens get it,” she said. “They understand why this is such a valuable part of our way of life and are supportive of any way to make government more transparent.”

The telephone poll was conducted from Sept. 19-22 by Selzer & Co. of West Des Moines. Of those reached on their landlines and cell phones, 803 agreed to complete the survey by answering 18 questions about open government and additional demographic questions, Richardson said.

Key findings included:

- Sixty-seven percent of participants favor creation of a board to handle citizen complaints about access to meetings and records.

- Sixty-nine percent said they know little or nothing about the state’s open government laws. Only 5 percent expressed a great deal of familiarity with the laws.

- Eighty-five percent expressed confidence the purpose of the laws is to provide access to all citizens, not just the news media.

- Sixty-three percent said government should do more to open meetings and make records accessible.

- Ninety-six percent said public officials’ expense reports should be available.

- Ninety percent said list of candidates under consideration for major state and local government jobs should be available.

- Only about one-third (36 percent and 32 percent, respectively) favored public availability of autopsy reports and the names of crime victims.

An Iowa Public Information Board would provide a place to which citizens, government officials and the media could direct questions about access, said Chris Mudge, executive director of the Iowa Newspaper Association.

Her organization has proposed creation of such a board for at least five years. The newspaper group and the freedom of information council have called for the board to have enforcement powers.

“The fact 67 percent of Iowans see that as something they would support I view as very positive,” said Mudge.

Iowans reacted strongly and favorably to the idea their tax dollars are the price of admission to government meetings and their ticket to review government records, pollsters concluded.

Those surveyed were “little concerned that requiring document requesters to pay the costs of copies imposes any barrier to access,” the poll found. “Rather they see charging requesters as a legitimate way for government offices to recover the costs of providing copies.”

Iowa’s Public Records law restricts copying fees to actual cost of providing the service.

Overall, “Iowans seek more openness even at the expense of privacy of government employees and officials, more effort to make access to government records and meetings easier and more opportunities to have input into government decisions,” the polling company concluded.

Yet every quarter, 13,000 businesses fail to remit sales tax collections in full or on time, according to the Department of Revenue. That’s 52,000 Iowa businesses a year.

Why? When times are tough and revenue falls short, some business owners are using that tax money to cover expenses.

“This isn’t your money,” said Courtney Kay-Decker, director of the Department of Revenue. “You’re collecting it for us, and your duty is to remit it to us. You should not be using it for your own operations. It should never be a float for you. It’s always our money that you’re holding effectively in trust for us.”

The state does not break out industry segments that accounted for an overall 17.1 percent increase from the previous year of all sales tax delinquencies in Iowa, to $84.2 million at the end of the state’s 2011 fiscal year on June 30.

But a review of hundreds of liens filed this year in Linn County alone found restaurants were 38 percent of those posted for failure to remit sales tax.

“Restaurants have a very high failure rate, especially in the first year,” said Jeff Braverman, president of Hawkeye Foodservice Distribution of Coralville. His company provides restaurants with their lifeblood and counts on owners to make their payments. “Foodservice distributors are very cautious when extending credit.”

Curt Pooley of Solon remembers the call from David Bailey, his former business partner, with the news that Bishop’s Inc., their Cedar Rapids-based buffet restaurant company, would be closing.

Bishop's Buffet at Lindale Mall, shown here, closed on Sept. 11, 2003. The Westdale Mall location folded in April 2007. (Gazette file photo)

“It would have been 2007 when Dave got ahold of me, and he says, ‘Well, I’ve got to shut things down.’

“I said, ‘Why’s that?’

“He said, ‘Well, I really screwed up. I never paid any sales tax.’

“It was a good thing I was sitting down. I don’t know how in the thunder he got himself into that position.”

Four years later, penalties and interest have pushed the Bishop’s sales tax delinquency past $323,000, making it the state’s third-largest such debt, according to the Department of Revenue.

Bailey and his wife, Marcia, who served as a company officer, are solely liable, revenue officials said.

They left the state more than three years ago. When reporters from The Gazette and KCRG-TV9 visited their Omaha, Neb., home in September, Bailey said they are unable to pay the debt.

“We don’t have any money,” he said. “It just actually broke us, the company did.”

Restaurant ownership is challenging, said Nancy Abram, a University of Iowa retail-marketing lecturer and former executive with Hardee’s.

“To really create innovations, new concepts or a new idea, you have to have creative skills,” she said, “but to run a successful restaurant, you have to have nuts-and-bolts management skills.”

When Hawkeye Foodservice’s best customers fall behind, Braverman’s company may require pay-as-you-go terms until the restaurant regains its financial health.

“Sometimes restaurateurs will tell us they don’t want to go back to weekly or biweekly payment terms,” he said. “They say, ‘When I pay you C.O.D., it helps me manage my cash flow better.’ ”

Starting an independent restaurant is difficult enough, but restarting one after the 2008 flood and in the middle of a recession is really tough, as was the case with Zins in downtown Cedar Rapids. The stream of customers after the flood did not always generate sufficient cash flow.

The Department of Revenue has recorded liens totaling $113,248 against Zins. The restaurant is on a payment plan with the state, the IRS and some vendors, co-owner Lee Belfield said.

“It doesn’t leave any money to play with, but we are getting by,” he said. Failing to remit “can be a pretty punitive situation … to put yourself into.”

Co-owner Amy Wyss is no longer involved in daily restaurant operations for health reasons. Belfield said she made other choices than he would have regarding tax funds. Wyss declined to be interviewed.

For restaurant owners operating on a thin margin, it’s a temptation to use sales taxes as cash flow, but “it’s a temptation you have to resist,” Belfield said.

Wyss negotiated a payment plan for the delinquent sales tax, and Belfield negotiated a plan for the delinquent IRS withholdings, he said.

Beyond restaurants

On average during each of the past five years, about 1,250 Iowa businesses failed to settle their sales tax accounts within a few months. Delinquencies numbered 21,041 as of Nov. 1.

Many delinquent businesses close. Those that remain open face liens that encumber their assets. In addition to sales taxes, owners owe penalties and interest. Their debts are posted on county websites.

In the past two years, the state has referred 14 sales tax delinquents for criminal prosecution.

Read more: Two examples of Linn County restaurant ventures that encountered tax deliquency problems.

Between June 2010 and June 2011, the Department of Revenue posted sales tax liens exceeding $1.3 million against Chicago-based MKMB Restaurant Partners LLC, which acquired the Burger King franchise in seven Iowa counties in March 2009.

Co-founder Martin L. King said the Iowa delinquency is not as big as it appears and that it will be paid off by April 2012.

Chief Financial Officer Sue Connolly said the $1.3 million in liens is almost double the amount MKMB failed to remit and is almost double the amount it is required to repay. King said the original debt was in the range of $600,000 to $800,000.

Revenue officials admit liens usually reflect an inflated estimate of the tax due. The amount sought can be negotiated; the total paid by an individual business seldom is disclosed.

“It’s not one that any of us could be proud of in this position, but we have forthrightly entered into an installment agreement, and we are more than 80 percent done paying what’s owed,” said King, a lawyer who also serves as chairman of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition founded by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

On Sept. 17, 2010, Linn County recorded the release of four state sales tax liens that had been generated by delinquencies dating as far back as December 1999 against a Cedar Rapids enterprise called 1895 Ellis Inc.

The liens were released more than eight years after the dissolution of the corporation against which they were assigned. Restaurants that had operated at 1895 Ellis Blvd. under a variety of names and owners were long closed. The building was ruined in the 2008 flood and sat condemned.

In response to a public records request from The Gazette, the Department of Revenue provided copies of records revealing it had settled the liens with a balance of $27,882 for $100 — less than one-half of 1 percent of the amount due.

The state settled with Ronald and Wayne Myers, the brothers behind 1895 Ellis Inc. and some of the restaurants that had done business at the site. Installment payments had been made for years.

— Steven R. Reed/The Gazette

A union leader blamed Gov. Terry Branstad for eliminating state employees’ jobs and hobbling the effort to collect the taxes.

The governor’s spokesman, meanwhile, characterized the rise in delinquencies as “a reflection of our fragile economy (that) further illustrates that our businesses are struggling within our tax and regulatory environment.”

Although the state fiscal year ended June 30, the revenue department continued to calculate collections and to make adjustments through October. When the process was completed, sales and use tax delinquencies totaled $84.2 million — a 17.1 percent increase over the $71.9 million owed a year ago.

Sales tax makes up the overwhelming majority of the sales-use deficit.

Also, the number of delinquent accounts jumped 8.8 percent, from 19,347 to 21,041; new liabilities topped $100 million for the first time; and collections of delinquent accounts fell by 26.4 percent, or $13.1 million — meaning only $36.4 million was collected from delinquents.

The combination of growing delinquencies and falling collections spurred Danny Homan, president of the Iowa council of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, to take issue with Branstad.

“This is nothing more than this governor trying to downsize state government to the point it can’t function,” Homan said. “That’s what they’ve done with revenue folks. … If anything, they should increase staff in that department to get the money that is owed to the people of the state of Iowa.”

Homan said reductions in revenue department staffing allow “people who have a history of not paying to continue to not pay their taxes.”

But Tim Albrecht, the governor’s spokesman, said the department has increased staffing in collections and compliance and is working with delinquents to collect the debts without pressuring the businesses to close.

“It would be foolish to say staff cuts or any one factor contributed to the drop” in collections, said Victoria Daniels, spokeswoman for the revenue department.

According to the new figures, the department also wrote off a record $52.1 million in assessments filed against delinquent taxpayers. An unspecified but substantial portion of that adjustment involved inflated estimates made when businesses failed to file or remit.

Each component of the $84.2 million delinquency is a legal obligation until the taxpayer responds and works with the state to determine the tax due.

Because the state imposes penalties and monthly interest, businesses have an incentive to remit promptly. Nevertheless, about 13,000, on average, fail to remit on time each quarter, the revenue department says.

State sales tax and consumer’s use tax are applied to the receipts from sales of tangible personal property and taxable services. The rate for each is 6 percent.

Businesses collect sales tax from consumers at the time of sale. The businesses are responsible for reporting and remitting the tax. Use tax is imposed after the sale and only on goods and services for which sales tax was not collected.

The Department of Revenue has written off an additional $6.7 million in the past five years.

At 6 cents state tax on the dollar, that represents a potential $1.3 billion in retail purchases and services for which sales or use tax should have been collected and forwarded to the state coffers.

Related story

What do ‘sales tax’ and ‘use tax’ mean?

“Delinquencies have grown faster than sales tax revenues have grown,” said Stuart Vos, Iowa’s chief tax collector at the Department of Revenue.

If the rates of increase continue, delinquencies will surpass $100 million by fiscal 2017 and another $9 million will be purged as uncollectable.

“When I buy a shirt or purchase something, it’s my assumption those taxes are getting turned in to the state,” said Sen. Joe Bolkcom, D-Iowa City. “When it doesn’t happen, we need to have a more robust effort. Taxpayers are paying the money, and if it is leaking out of the system, taxpayers ought to expect it will be collected.”

Many cases are settled, but few cases are ever referred for criminal prosecution, and millions are written off each year as long-term delinquencies hit the statute of limitations.

How much does it matter?

Top revenue officials play down the significance of sales tax delinquencies and said collections are not likely to receive more attention unless the Legislature or governor insists.

Courtney Kay-Decker, executive director, Iowa Department of Revenue

“In fiscal year ’11, which ended June 30, the total sales and use tax was about $2.4 billion, so delinquencies of $70 million — it is a big number, but in relation to that overall picture, it’s really relatively small,” said Courtney Kay-Decker, executive director of the Department of Revenue.

“Collections are a small portion of what we do. So when we’re talking about, ‘OK, do we solve this problem by throwing more money at collecting delinquencies?’ we have to weigh that with counsel from the Legislature and from the governor, who is our boss, about where he wants us to put our resources,” she said.

Delinquencies have fluctuated since 2000, making it difficult to dismiss their overall growth as just an effect of the recession.

Fiscal 2010 ended with a record 19,347 delinquent accounts statewide, compared with 14,557 at the end of 2000. Most fiscal 2011 tax figures will not be released until November.

The aggregate value of delinquencies increased $40 million over the past decade, and the average delinquency jumped 75 percent to $3,716, including penalties and interest.

The rise in delinquencies coincided with staffing cuts throughout the department — 35.2 percent overall and 13 percent among collections employees since 2000. Kay-Decker said it’s too soon to tell if additional staffing is needed. More likely, she said, revenue employees need to do more with less.

Bolkcom, who chairs the Iowa Senate’s Ways and Means Committee, said taxpayers have an interest in making sure the sales tax they pay is remitted to the state “so we can support public education, health care, public safety and all the things government does.”

Iowans who collect but do not remit sales taxes “are breaking the law, and we ought to have a system in place that is adequately funded to track them down and get them to pay the money,” Bolkcom said.

Reluctance to get tough

Funding may be less an issue than the department’s reluctance to “criminalize” business owners who don’t pay their taxes.

In the past two fiscal years, 34 cases of willful fraud uncovered by state auditors resulted in the offenders paying a 75 percent tax penalty. Only 14 of the thousands of long-term delinquencies in the same period were referred to county attorneys for criminal prosecution.

The department refused to identify the businesses caught cheating.

“I like to think we only have 14 (criminal referrals) because we have a lot of good people in Iowa,” Kay-Decker said.

She said they have statutory and regulatory guidelines for when to pursue criminal sanctions, and those rules leave room for discretion.

“If the Legislature decides that we should be very aggressive about how we go after these taxpayers, that would be our obligation,” Kay-Decker said.

Vos, the revenue operations administrator, said delinquency figures are not as bad as they appear, because the department inflates some tax assessments before ultimately settling for less.

He said some Iowa businesses file their returns on time but fail to pay all they owe. Others don’t file a return or pay.

Stuart Vos, administrator, Iowa Revenue Operations Division

“With those who failed to file and failed to pay, we … look at what has been paid in the past,” he said. “We look at the information that we have on the business, and we will assess them for more than we think they possibly can pay. If we don’t do that, people will want to just allow themselves to be assessed and then pay.

“ … a very large proportion of it eventually gets abated because the taxpayer files the correct return. So if we assess somebody $10,000, they may actually only owe $2,000. That $10,000 assessment is an enforcement activity that says, ‘You need to come clean with us and file your return.’ ”

The assessment is an estimate, and “we’re not going to estimate low,” he said. Review of the return often results in a net adjustment of the tax, though not the interest that accompanied the punitive assessment.

“If those people would actually file their returns, it’s likely they’re going to end up paying a considerable amount less,” he said.

The value of Iowa’s long-term sales and use tax delinquencies in fiscal 2010 was $104.6 million before the department applied net adjustments of $32.7 million for late filers.

Kay-Decker was reluctant to see this collections technique shared publicly.

“That tidbit of information is not helpful because that encourages people to kick the can down the road,” Kay-Decker said. “It loses the enforcement effectiveness if they think that they are going to be assessed this higher amount, but they’re never going to have to pay that.”

Not all cases have criminal intent

About 13,000 delinquent accounts are generated every quarter, according to the Department of Revenue. A high percentage of new delinquencies are satisfied within one year.

Most of the delinquent dollars were collected from customers by merchants who made retail sales or provided services. The money never reached the state treasury for various reasons: the impact of a recessionary economy, natural disasters and health problems, as well as fraud and using sales tax to pay other bills or enhance lifestyles.

For those who fail to remit the taxes they collect, interest begins to accrue from the date the tax is due. If tax and interest are not paid within 60 days, an assessment is created.

Assessments are recorded in the appropriate county, creating a lien through which the state asserts a claim on the assets of the delinquent business and responsible party, typically the owner or top corporate executives.

The majority of the 19,437 long-term delinquencies are more than 3 months old but less than 10 years old. A 10-year statute of limitations allows the oldest delinquencies to be purged. The department can file another assessment if eventual collection is considered possible.

Last year, the department settled a 9-year-old Cedar Rapids delinquency for $100, less than one-half of 1 percent of the amount due, even though the former business owner was making payments on his debt.

Kay-Decker, Vos and Special Assistant Attorney General Donn Stanley said criminal prosecution depends on the totality of circumstances, including criminal intent, and the department’s resources.

Some delinquents might have criminal intent, Stanley said, but “there are a lot of non-criminal reasons why people go out of business and end up not being able” to pay tax and other bills.

“We can get people who can pay to pay with the tools that we have,” Vos said, citing liens, levies, garnishments and criminal charges as strong enforcement tools.

Despite its enforcement arsenal, officials admit to being virtually powerless to collect sales tax debts or to prosecute Iowa business owners who move to other states, even if they have high-paying jobs and regardless of whether they fled Iowa primarily to evade the debt.

“Collection options are limited when a responsible party moves out of state, completely severs all business ties and has no Iowa source income or assets,” said Victoria Daniels, administrator for tax policy and communications.

Prosecuting fraud

Revenue officials say they have three options if they believe the failure to remit taxes was fraudulent: impose a 75 percent penalty, pursue a civil case or pursue criminal prosecution.

When department officials conclude a delinquency should be referred for criminal prosecution: The referral must be made to a county attorney; the county attorney has discretion whether to file charges; and 3. if the county attorney declines to take the case, he or she may refer it to the Attorney General’s Office or do nothing.

State law devoted to the Department of Revenue, however, states: “It shall be the duty of the attorney general and of the county attorneys in their respective counties to commence and prosecute actions, prosecutions and complaints, when so directed by the director of revenue …”

Requests for specific dates of the department’s 14 criminal referrals, the counties to which the referrals were made and the amounts of the delinquencies were denied.

Linn County Attorney Jerry Vander Sanden, a local prosecutor for 28 years, said he has never seen a sales tax delinquency case referred to the county attorney’s office. Johnson County Attorney Janet Lyness said she could not recall any, either.

Vos, the state’s tax collections chief, said the Department of Revenue never will enjoy 100 percent success.

“I think if we could put collections out of business, that would be the compliance silver bullet, but it is just human nature,” he said.

Related articles

• Sales-tax holiday weekend: A shopper’s guide (thegazette.com)

The Legislature in 2001 added an access exemption under the public records law for critical asset-protection plans. Ten years later, the plans are exempt from being copied in any manner. Residents may examine the lists after approval of a written request, however.

In 2006, the Legislature added an exemption for information about security procedures or emergency preparedness developed for the protection of government employees, visitors and property “if disclosure could reasonably be expected to jeopardize” those people or property.

Exemptions created in 2002 for security procedures or emergency preparedness plans for schools and for certain records by public airports, municipal corporations, municipal utilities and rural water districts were repealed in 2007.

Another legislative change permitted the dissemination of previously exempt intelligence data if sharing that information would protect a person or property from a threat of imminent, serious harm.

Until that 2003 revision, the Department of Public Safety might have learned of a plan to sabotage a public water supply but would not have been able to share the information with municipal water treatment plant officials.

“The change gives us more latitude to release information that was once purely confidential,” said Jim Saunders, director of Public Safety’s Division of Intelligence and Fusion Center. “We’re now able to provide information to that organization to take steps to … prevent something from happening.”

The Bush administration used 9/11 as the basis for restricting access to federal records. On Oct. 12, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memo informing federal agencies they had considerably more discretion in denying Freedom of Information requests than had been the case.

“The memo literally changed the marching orders from openness to closure,” said Keith Werhan, vice dean of Tulane University Law School, in the Tulane Law Review.

First Amendment advocates expressed “a lot of concerns immediately after 9/11 that the changes in federal law and state law in response to terrorist acts were going to have an adverse impact on Iowans’ access to information,” said Kathleen Richardson with the Iowa Freedom of Information Council.

“There were changes in the state public records law that did limit access in some areas,” she said. “In retrospect … it hasn’t been as much of an issue in Iowa as maybe on the coasts or areas with bigger populations.”

President Barack Obama issued a memorandum directing federal agencies to administer the Freedom of Information Act “with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.” Attorney General Eric Holder formally rescinded Ashcroft’s memo in March 2009.

Still, implementation of the Obama-Holder policy has been slow and incomplete, said Daniel Metcalfe, executive director of a FOIA research center at American University’s College of Law.

Bricks Bar and Grill in downtown Cedar Rapids is now closed permanently. (Mike Griffith/The Gazette)

A process that played out for almost a year has ended with a downtown watering hole locking its doors.

On Thursday, the front door and back patio gate at Bricks Bar & Grill, 320 Second Ave. SE, were locked. The bar was dark and empty of people and of some of its furniture.

Drew Munson, president of the partnership that owned the bar, declined to comment on the circumstances that led to the closing or to speculate on the future of the business, saying he “had a falling out” with his partners.

Bricks filed an application to renew its liquor license on Sept. 28, 2010. That application, which was approved by the Cedar Rapids City Council, was then sent to the state Alcoholic Beverages Division. The ABD discovered the corporation that owned the bar had been dissolved by the Secretary of State’s office for failure to deliver its 2010 biennial report. As a result, Bricks “no longer met the standards of ‘good moral character,’” according to the ABD.

The liquor license application identified Daniel Oberreuter and Peter Moeller, both of Cedar Rapids, and Munson as each holding a 33.3 percent interest in the business. Oberreuter and Moeller could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Bricks failed to meet a June 27 deadline to pursue further appeal of the denial of liquor license renewal. Loss of the license was effective June 28.

As of Thursday, no tax liens were recorded against Bricks or its owners in Linn County. Assessments for delinquent accounts sometimes are not recorded as liens for several months. If the delinquency is paid, it’s possible no lien ever will be filed.

On March 7, Munson notified ABD he was working with the Department of Revenue “to resolve the LLC issue at hand” and expected reinstatement of corporate status by March 21. That date passed without reinstatement, however.

Dozens of crimes were investigated at the bar by Cedar Rapids police in the past two years. Police linked the majority of the incidents to Bricks’ “Bottomless Domestic Cup” nights, which featured unlimited beer refills for a set price of $5.

The quest to find lower medical costs can be a challenging one. (file photo)

Brenda Moore kept notes. First call, Feb. 22. Last call, April 5. Six weeks of calling physicians, hospitals and insurers.

Retired in Solon after 31 years as a nurse practitioner with University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, she was experienced — considered herself an expert — at helping others find care they could afford.

“That’s why I hung in there,” Moore, 58, said.

A veteran of two colonoscopies, she never dreamed getting cost estimates for a third would take so long.

The price can be anything but transparent for Iowans trying to identify costs in advance of health care procedures ranging from childbirth and mammograms to knee replacement and colonoscopies, a Gazette investigation revealed.

Generations of physicians, focused since med school on providing the best care possible, may have no idea what to say to patients who want to know how much treatment will cost. Legislation mandating price transparency among all health care providers and insurers died in Congress last year. Meanwhile, medical professionals and insurers do not agree where price transparency should begin.

Not here, the reimbursement director of a Cedar Rapids eye clinic told The Gazette.

“Every time you call a physician’s office for questions regarding your insurance coverage or estimates of costs, it increases the overhead of the physician’s office,” Dawn Waller said. “We have to have someone answer the phone, triage the call, take the appropriate action and follow up.”

“I agree that patients need to be informed about their health care costs, but it needs to start with the patient and insurance company.”

Compare hospital costs for various medical procedures with the Iowa Hospital Association’s cost comparison tool.

Some physicians’ offices quote the price of the treatment they provide, but also tell patients to check elsewhere to find the overall cost, which might include radiology, pathology, anesthesia and hospital stays. Patients told The Gazette of being advised to check with insurance companies, hospitals, websites and human resources departments.

No matter whom consumers ask, the most common answer probably is, “It depends.”

“There are some 3,000 different procedures that are possible with a hospital, all of which have variations to them,” said Tim Charles, CEO of Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids.

“While we tend to want to distill this all down to a highly predictable, factory-like environment, it’s not always possible to do that,” Charles said. “It’s very, very complex.”

Dr. Tom Evans, president of the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative, said health care reform and cost transparency encompass “a very complicated answer” that some providers are unable to explain and some consumers are unwilling to follow to the end.

As a result, while the quality of health care in Iowa never may have been better, the consumer experience in estimating costs can be exasperating.

What might have been

Estimating medical costs might have been easier if the Transparency in All Health Care Pricing Act had passed Congress last year.

“The piece of legislation I put forward, I can summarize it in one sentence,” said Dr. Steve Kagen, former owner of a group of Midwestern allergy clinics and a former Democratic congressman from Appleton, Wis.

“Any and all individuals or business entities, including hospitals, physicians, nurses, pharmacies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, dentists and insurance entities that offer health care-related items, products, services, or procedures to the public shall publicly disclose, on a continuous basis, all prices for those products, services and procedures in an open and conspicuous manner …”

He paused for emphasis and a gulp of air.

“ … including on the Internet, and including all wholesale, retail, subsidized, discounted or other such prices accepted as payment in full.”

RELATED STORIES:

• To save on medical costs, ask the right questions, reimbursement director says
• Marion mom finds big savings on kids’ surgeries
• How area hospitals handle price transparency

Kagen understands better than most the difference between sticker price and payment in full in the relationships between patients, providers and insurers.

At a time when consumers might have settled for a small advance in price transparency, Kagen pushed for a law that would have revealed the differences between price quotes and discounts down to the last cent.

“That would create a real marketplace,” he said in an interview. “Anything before the discounts is just an asking price.”

Hope for consumers

Even without the Kagen bill as law, consumers could shop someday for health care like they shop for cars, major appliances and home remodelers. When is not certain, but momentum in that direction is building. For it to happen, though, experts say consumers must accept greater responsibility for their health, diminish their roles as insured spectators and take advantage of transparency.

Writing during spring in the New England Journal of Medicine, Meredith Rosenthal and Anna Sinaiko of the Harvard School of Public Health examined factors that influence likelihood. Consumers “are generally ignorant” of price differences for the same procedures at different hospitals, they wrote. “Publishing price information could both narrow the range and lower the level of prices …”

On the other hand and thanks to insurance, most patients pay little of the cost of their medical care. Because of that, their incentive to choose a lower-cost provider is dramatically weakened, the authors said. Patients also may be unwilling to go against a clinician’s advice in the interest of saving a few dollars.

Finally, they pointed out, the price information consumers would find most useful — the personalized price an enrollee in a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan would pay at a particular hospital for a knee replacement, for example — is difficult to find.

During tests of the Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield online cost-estimator tool, three Gazette employees who are Wellmark members were unable to price knee replacements or colonoscopies in any specific hospitals nor could the tool be used to compare hospital charges for any procedure.

Confusion, frustration

Cost confusion lingers for countless reasons, including medical profession traditions and the complexity and controversy of reform — simultaneously cheered, condemned and legally challenged. Meanwhile, long explanations about cost estimates test consumer patience.

Evans, a former president of the Iowa Medical Society who practiced family medicine for 13 years, sees frustration boiling. “When patients say, ‘How much will this cost me?’ they (physicians) may not know,” Evans said. As a result, consumers feel “health care won’t give us a straight answer.”

Dixie Ann Scott, 67, a “retired grandma” in Cedar Rapids, agrees.

“I have found it very difficult to have a doctor, hospital or insurance company pinpoint the exact costs of different procedures,” she said in response to a Gazette solicitation for reader experiences.

“The doctor fudges and says to contact my insurance company. The insurance company (doesn’t) want to give out information if the hospital costs are going to be different. The hospital gives you the routine that it depends on what your insurance company covers and what your co-payments are, etc., etc.

“Are you getting the picture here?

“I am done trying to get any info from the medical field. I have come to one conclusion. They all lie.”

Message disconnect

Evans and other Iowa medical leaders say they are eager to explain why pricing is a moving target and hope Iowans hear them out. They promise more accessible and precise cost information is coming.

Distanced from his medical practice, Evans’ role as founder in 2005 and leader of Iowa’s clearinghouse for medical professionals provides him with a broad perspective. Transparency is a cornerstone of the collaborative’s mission.

He does not criticize physicians and hospital administrators who don’t get it. He understands their baggage — a long tradition of care-centric, one-way, doctor-knows-best communications.

“Historically, the consumer was responsible for nothing other than showing up when the doctor said to and ‘do what I say and take your prescriptions.’ We used to measure patient compliancy,” he said in an interview.

“In health care, historically, we have not been focused on costs. You come in broken and we fix you. That was our previous paradigm.”

In the new paradigm, physicians are to abandon the past despite uncertainties about the future. The pace of change is accelerating, which makes communication vital.

And that, Evans said, is where things have broken down.

Health care providers speak their own language and are “like at a second-grade level in communicating what they do” to the public, he said.

No single answer

There also is the exasperating absence of a single, straightforward answer to the fundamental, how-much-will-my-procedure-cost question.

Almost anyone in medicine knows why “it depends.” The difference between the wear and tear on your knee vs. the next patient’s knee is a variable, one of hundreds.

“Say two people are scheduled to have a colonoscopy,” St. Luke’s Hospital spokeswoman Laura Rainey said. “One of these patients is healthy with no underlying medical conditions. The other individual has diabetes. Both patients will pay the same base price for a colonoscopy, but there are a few more things medically that will need to be done to care for the patient with diabetes and that in turn drives up the cost for that patient’s care.

“Add into that scenario that during the colonoscopy the surgeon removes two precancerous polyps and that also increases the original base price estimate. Some aspects of care cannot be predicted.”

Although 9,518 knee replacements were performed in Iowa hospitals last year, “doctors do it different ways,” Evans said. “Every patient is different. Different tests are required. Different techniques are used. There’s variability, depending on how they treat you and how they were trained … We need to reduce the variability.”

Price the variables

If variability makes up everything, why not give consumers cost estimates for the variables? “Personalized, episode-level costs would be more meaningful to patients,” Harvard’s Rosenthal and Sinaiko wrote in March.

As recently as April, Mercy Medical Center boasted of having had a price transparency policy since 2007 and of offering patients a chance to compare costs for common procedures. However, an online cost-comparison feature it offered was a minimum of 17 unmapped clicks away from Mercy’s home page, and on another website. Price ranges listed for common procedures were broad.

When those disconnects were pointed out to Charles, Mercy’s CEO accepted the remarks as constructive criticism and took action.

Within weeks, Mercy’s home page added a prominent “Pricing Quick Link.” One click enabled future patients to find the transparency policy. The policy page linked to the Iowa Hospital Association’s website, where consumers can compare prices for every Iowa hospital.

Coincidentally, the association’s site also underwent a significant spring makeover. Years of one-size-fits-all-patients’ price ranges were replaced by categories of variables — four in the case of a knee replacement, 14 for a colonoscopy.

When all of the 1,726 non-trauma knee replacements performed at the four Cedar Rapids and Iowa City hospitals in 2010 are compared, consumers learn:

• Mercy Iowa City performed the most knee replacements of minor or moderate severity but the fewest of major or extreme severity.
• St. Luke’s was the least expensive area hospital for a knee replacement of any level of severity.
• St. Luke’s patients also experienced the shortest hospital stays in all categories of severity.
• Mercy Iowa City was the most expensive area hospital for knee replacements of minor or moderate severity; UI Hospitals was the most expensive for replacements of major or extreme severity.
• At an average of $39,746, a knee replacement of minor severity cost $5,106 more at UI Hospitals than the statewide average for all Iowa hospitals.
• A knee replacement of moderate severity cost $8,736 more at UI Hospitals than the statewide average.
• A knee replacement of major severity cost $17,450 more at UI Hospitals than the statewide average.
• A knee replacement of extreme severity cost, on average, $120,607 at UI Hospitals, $69,967 at St. Luke’s and $85,965 statewide.

Brenda’s revelation

Brenda Moore, 58, of Solon, a retired nurse practitioner who spent months researching the cost of a colonoscopy.

If Brenda Moore, the retired nurse practitioner, had visited Mercy Medical Center’s website home page during her six-week search for comparative prices for a colonoscopy, she would have seen no references to its transparency policy, pricing or cost comparisons. Similarly, the home page for St. Luke’s offered no instructions for finding its price transparency policy or cost estimates.

UI Hospitals’ website offered no mention of pricing transparency or cost comparisons and did not link to the Iowa Hospital Association comparison tool. Mercy Iowa City’s home page did not mention pricing, transparency or cost comparisons but linked in just two clicks to the association’s comparison tool.

Now, all but UI Hospitals link to the association’s cost-estimator.

Moore recently visited Mercy Medical Center’s updated site and clicked to the price comparisons. “I was shocked,” she said. “In five or 10 minutes you can pull up all that information. I thought, ‘I spent six weeks trying to get this!’”

Given her career and cost-comparison experience, Moore pointed out that physician, lab and other fees still had to be identified and added for an accurate estimate of out-of-pocket expenses.

Overall though, a few small clicks by Moore represented one more step forward in Iowans’ journey toward health care cost transparency.

• Adopted price transparency as policy in 2007.
• Only hospital whose site had identifiable link to prices; site also links to Iowa Hospital Association cost-comparison tool.
• Provides financial counselors at (319) 398-6854 or (319) 221-8960.
• Works to identify and reach out to patients who might need financial help but might not ask for it.
• Volunteers counsel Medicare patients about Iowa’s Senior Health Insurance Information Program.
• Commissioned development of a “patient portal” for rollout this fall to help patients be more engaged, informed, empowered and satisfied.
• Encourages potential patients to check with insurance carriers about coverage.
• Web: http://www.mercycare.org

St. Luke’s Hospital, Cedar Rapids

• Recommends potential patients call (319) 369-7513 to talk to counselors 24/7 about cost estimates.
• Helps uninsured or underinsured patients determine whether they qualify for discounts.
• Website links to the Iowa Hospital Association cost-comparison tool, but says the information through IHA “is not as current as having a personal conversation with a financial counselor.”
• Pre-Surgical Testing Department works with patients to confirm coverage and identify anticipated out-of-pocket expenses.
• Distributes Healthbeat magazine to 50,000 area consumers to share ways to obtain cost information.
• Publishes Annual Report to the Community in The Gazette and posts the information on St. Luke’s website. Articles have included “St. Luke’s Priceline” and “Taking the guesswork out of hospital charges.”
• Provides information online about hospital billing and financial counselors at www.stlukescr.org/about-us/billing-questions/; lists estimated costs for common procedures.
• Web: http://www.stlukescr.org/

University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Iowa City

• Cost transparency is based on individual patients; general cost information not made available.
• Encourages patients to contact the financial counseling staff at (319) 384-6275 for details.
• Estimates treatment costs; verifies insurance coverage; determines patient liability; screens for financial aid; establishes budget payments; determines eligibility for Uncompensated Care Program; assists with the application.
• Web: www.uihealthcare.org

Mercy Iowa City

• Encourages consumers to contact Mercy On Call, (319) 358-2767, to ask about charges.
• Website links to the Iowa Hospital Association’s online cost-comparison tool.
• Web: www.mercyic.org

Michele Brock worked hard to identify cost savings when daughter, Jackie, 11, needed a tonsillectomy and daughter Jillian, 16 months, needed tubes in her ears. (Liz Martin/The Gazette)

Marion mom Michele Brock has twice gone on cost-comparison missions for health care, and both times it saved her family money.

In 2007, daughter Jackie, then 7, needed a tonsillectomy and adenoid removal. In January this year, daughter Jillian, then 10 months, needed ear tubes.

Saddled with a high-deductible insurance plan, her family’s out-of-pocket costs would be substantial. Comparison shopping for quality care, however, saved Brock and her husband $1,600 to $1,800 overall.

There was no one-stop shopping in either case, only checking with physicians, clinics, hospitals; support resources, such as the Iowa Hospital Association website; and her husband’s insurance company.

Success depended upon her resourcefulness, persistence and the cooperation of others.

Facility fees are typically the biggest expense for surgical procedures. So Brock started with the billing departments of three Cedar Rapids providers — Mercy Medical Center, St. Luke’s Hospital and the Surgery Center.

“Four years ago, one facility couldn’t tell me what the costs would entail, another gave me a range and a third told me exactly what it would be — and they were right when I got the bill,” she said.

“Quality being the first measure and comparatively equal” among the facilities, Brock said, she chose the one with the lowest out-of-pocket costs for her family.

Brock said her experience this year revealed how provider responsiveness has changed.

“When I called four years ago, this was so new that in some instances I was directed to many different areas until someone could help me,” she said. “Now, facilities are ready and have designated people to answer these types of questions.”

She chose the same facility this year.

“When I called them this time, they were able to tell me again what the cost would be with our insurance plan.”

Her research also involved comparing costs on the Iowa Hospital Association website and talking to her husband’s insurance company.

“I’d say speaking to the actual providers of services themselves was the most helpful, because they can take your insurance information, take their costs, take the contractual agreement they have for your insurance and give you either an exact cost or a specific range,” she said.

“The insurance company won’t necessarily know or be able to tell what the hospital is charging, and the IHA site is just an estimate to get an idea of costs since it doesn’t know specific insurance plans,” she said.

Brock believes more people will shop around.

“As health care costs continue to go up … I think consumers and business owners have a vested interest in being part of the solution,” Brock said. “Looking into this was one way for me to learn more about the issue and about how that provider-insurance-consumer triangle interacts.”

Miller accused Defeat Diabetes Foundation Inc., of approving misleading telemarketing scripts used by Lino’s Inc., a professional fundraiser based in West Des Moines. Lino’s shut down last fall after the Attorney General’s Office executed a search warrant, Miller said in a news release.

District Judge Richard G. Blane ordered Defeat Diabetes Foundation Inc. to pay $10,000 to cover the costs of the investigation and $2,500 to support administration of Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act.

The charity’s contract with Lino’s provided for the telemarketer to keep 80 cents of each dollar raised.

Miller said the callers disproportionately targeted elderly residents in calls made between September 2007 and November 2010. At least 15 calls were recorded by employees of the Attorney General’s Office. Transcripts of several calls were included as evidence in the lawsuit Miller filed Wednesday.

Callers identifying themselves as Johnny, Gary, Chris, Eric, Charles, Bill, Tim, Chuck and Jim falsely claimed they were volunteers for the charity, the charity was based in Iowa, donations would stay in Iowa, calls were part of an annual drive and most of the money raised would be used to fight the causes of diabetes.

“After arranging for the telemarketer to call for contributions in the charity’s name, the foundation made little or no effort to ensure that money was being solicited fairly and honestly,” Miller said in a news release. “In fact, the foundation even gave its approval to misleading telemarketing scripts.”

Defeat Diabetes Foundation Inc., is based in Madiera Beach, Fla. Its president, Andrew P. Mandell, and its treasurer, Jerald Y. Mandell, signed a consent judgment last week agreeing to the operational ban and financial penalties. The Mandells denied any wrongdoing.

“We believe that a charity can’t look the other way when it knows or should know it is benefiting financially from misleading fundraising conducted in its name,” Miller said.

Representing himself as a member of Americans With Disabilities and originally from Dubuque, Jeff said he needed the dog because he’d gone blind after being exposed to Agent Orange while he was serving in Vietnam from 1971 to 1975.

Did the Iowa senior remember him mentioning his daughter, the one with cystic fibrosis, when he called in 2009? Well, she died last Thanksgiving Day.

With the heart-wrenching script recited, Jeff moved to close the sale.

For just $45.95, he could send two tins of cookies to the woman’s Des Moines home and be on his way to California to pick up his guide dog.

According to a lawsuit filed Friday by Attorney General Tom Miller, the only truth in any of Jeff’s claims is that his first name actually is Jeff.

In responding to a subpoena, Jeff Balke, 52, the presumed telemarketer whose “blatant lies” were recorded by the Attorney General’s Office during an undercover telephone trap on March 8, admitted he is not blind, did not serve in Vietnam, has three children with no health problems, and is not a native Iowan.

Balke “knew his lies would stir up emotion and likely raise his income,” Miller said in a news release. “What he didn’t know is that we were recording his phone call.”

Defendants in the lawsuit filed in Polk County District Court and alleging consumer fraud are Balke, Americans With Disabilities, which is a for-profit Arizona corporation, and Dale R. Seick, owner and manager of the company.

In written answers provided last month, Balke said he is 52 and did serve almost 11 years in the military, dividing his time between the Army, as a military policeman, and the Navy, as a yeoman. He said he had worked with Americans With Disabilities since August 2006 but is not disabled, though he “need(s) glasses.”

The lawsuit includes a copy of a sales insert from Americans With Disabilities in which the company claims to make “a special effort to enable handicapped or otherwise disadvantaged workers” by paying “a great percentage” of sales proceeds to workers who “have had trouble in obtaining employment in the mainstream workforce.”

A judge granted the attorney general’s request for a temporary injunction to prevent the defendants from engaging in deceptive practices. The lawsuit asks for civil penalties of up to $40,000 for each violation of the Consumer Fraud Act, and enhanced penalties of $5,000 for each Consumer Fraud Act violation committed against an older person.

At a news conference, Miller said although the case involves a for-profit company, it is typical of some telemarketing practices conducted on behalf of charitable organizations by out-of-state solicitors.

An investigative report published last month by The Gazette found Iowa charities that use outside telemarketers received an average of only 22 cents of each $1 raised.

When Iowans receive calls soliciting donations for charitable organizations and non-profits, they should ask the caller how much the fundraising organization receives, Miller said.

“That helps weed out problems,” he said. “Iowans are very caring people, very giving people. We don’t want them being taken advantage of.”

RELATED COVERAGE:

• Iowa leads way in ‘undercover phone’ work to snare telemarketers
• Marion telemarketer says business isn’t highly profitable
• Charitable fundraisers not required to register in Iowa
• Fair share? Telemarketers for Iowa charities keep most of the money they raise

Bill Brauch is Director of the Consumer Protection Division of the Iowa Attorney General's Office, which monitors telemarketers with this undercover phone. When the phone rings, a legal secretary waves the stop sign to quiet the office. Photographed Tuesday, May 10, 2011, in Des Moines. (Liz Martin/SourceMedia Group News)

Iowa charities that use outside telemarketers received an average of just 22 cents of each $1 raised, a Gazette investigation found. An overwhelming majority of Iowa charities that contract with telemarketers agreed to accept 20 percent or less of the revenues generated. When Iowans responded to telemarketers who called on behalf of out-of-state organizations, the splits often were more lopsided. Fundraisers sometimes kept 98 or 99 cents of each dollar donated. Because most telemarketers operate outside Iowa, more than 67 percent of the money donated to Iowa charities flowed instead to California, Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota, Oregon, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Telemarketing registrations, financial disclosures and contracts are filed with the Consumer Protection Division of the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, which made them available to The Gazette.

A contract between Special Olympics Iowa and DialAmerica Marketing Inc. provided for the New Jersey telemarketer to keep 87.5 cents of each $1 raised through magazine sales. When DialAmerica called on behalf of Special Olympics Iowa for 24 months, ending in October, the non-profit received $142,100 of the $982,766 generated. That’s 14.5 cents for each $1, or 85.5 percent to DialAmerica, because some donors chose to give to the non-profit without purchasing a magazine.

Gary Steinke, an Urbandale resident who joined the Special Olympics Iowa board last year, said he was not aware telemarketers were getting so much of the money raised on the organization’s behalf. “I must say that I’m shocked,” said Steinke, whose 14-year-old son is a Special Olympian. “What also bothers me is that 80-some percent of this money is going out of state in the name of Special Olympics Iowa,” he said.

Mike Lightbody of Iowa City has coached Special Olympians for 10 years and has bought magazines from DialAmerica. “As a person who has given that money, I really got the feeling that a lot of it went to Special Olympics Iowa,” Lightbody said. “The 12 cents on the dollar seems pretty low.”

RELATED COVERAGE:

• Iowa leads way in ‘undercover phone’ work to snare telemarketers
• Marion telemarketer says business isn’t highly profitable
• Charitable fundraisers not required to register in Iowa
• Telemarketer sued over ‘blatant lies’ to Iowans

Mark Reed, president and CEO of Special Olympics Iowa, said the deal with DialAmerica is a marketing program. “We tell (Iowans called by DialAmerica) very clearly upfront that if they would like to purchase a magazine, that 12 and a half cents out of every dollar of the magazine subscription will go to Special Olympics,” Reed said. If people say they would rather make an outright donation, DialAmerica routes the contribution to the Iowa group, Reed said.

DialAmerica’s website says it makes 200 million calls per year. Some smaller telemarketing firms claim to share. 40 percent to 50 percent of magazine sales revenue with charitable organizations. The $454,458 raised in the first year of its two-year Special Olympics Iowa campaign was not tax-deductible, according to DialAmerica.

Overall, Iowa donations that did not qualify as tax-deductible totaled at least $1,206,666 — or 44 percent of the money collected by telemarketers during the most recent reporting periods.

Special Olympics Iowa also has a contract with an Arkansas telemarketer, The Heritage Co. For the collection year ending May 31, 2010, Heritage said it kept 52.4 percent of $454,712 raised. In September, Heritage was fined $15,000 by the state of Iowa after solicitors were recorded repeatedly obscuring their role and inflating the percentage of donations that would go to Children’s Wish Foundation, National Children’s Cancer Society and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Reed said none of the calls was on behalf of Special Olympics Iowa and that he remains confident in the telemarketer’s integrity.

Tracking telemarketers

The Attorney General’s Office requires commercial fundraisers to disclose whether their activities have incurred disciplinary action or legal sanctions outside Iowa, but relies on self-disclosure, on other agencies and on the Internet to identify telemarketing violations.

On March 25, 2010, and April 20, 2011, Joseph Gehl, president of Center Stage Attractions of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., signed Iowa registration forms in which he said the fundraiser had not been the subject of “a legal, administrative or other proceeding regarding any solicitation or registration as a solicitor or fundraiser.”

That wasn’t true, though. In May 2009, the Federal Trade Commission and South Carolina officials announced that Operation False Charity had found in the previous year that Center Stage Attractions solicitors had failed to make required disclosures when calling on behalf of the Columbia (S.C.) Fire Fighters Association.

Callers failed to disclose they were professional solicitors and did not give the true name of their fundraising company. Additionally, a notice of solicitation was not filed before the fundraising campaign. As a result, Center Stage Attractions signed an Assurance of Voluntary Compliance in March 2008 and was fined $12,000.

An AVC is an agreement settling concerns that, in this case, a telemarketer violated consumer protection laws. The telemarketer is allowed to deny the allegations but agrees to avoid future violations. Fines often are assessed as part of the settlements.

Iowa Professional Firefighters, an AFL-CIO affiliate based in West Des Moines, has relied on Gehl to conduct telemarketing on its behalf for about 15 years, said Rick Scofield, 56, a retired Cedar Rapids firefighter and president of the group.

Scofield, of Marion, said he is satisfied with the professionalism of Gehl’s fundraising. “I don’t get a lot of complaints,” Scofield told The Gazette. Scofield said he also is satisfied with the 20 percent the union group receives from Gehl’s company. “They do all the work,” he said.

Center Stage Attractions appears to be flying under the state’s radar. “It is very unlikely our office would ever be unaware that a particular fundraiser had entered into a settlement with another law enforcement agency, regardless of the form of settlement,” said William Brauch, 54, director of the Consumer Protection Division of the Attorney General’s Office. Even if his office was unaware, “we do not believe that a failure on the part of any company to report past enforcement activity has in any way diminished our ability to protect the people of Iowa against misleading charitable solicitations,” Brauch said. Brauch said no contract is on file between Center Stage Attractions and the Iowa Professional Firefighters, “as it is our understanding that that fundraiser is no longer raising funds on behalf of that charitable organization.”

Scofield told The Gazette that Center Stage is fundraising “right now.” “We write them a check every week for the amount owed to them,” Scofield said.

‘Unfair, deceptive’

In a contract with Minneapolis-based Public Safety Council LLP, the Iowa State Reserve Law Officers Association, based in Marshalltown, agreed to an 85/15 split of revenues. The telemarketing firm raised $97,265, of which $14,590 went to the law enforcement support group. The remaining $82,675 flowed from the accounts of Iowans to the owners and employees of a call center in St. Paul, Minn.

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller concluded the Minnesota telemarketing firm used “unfair and deceptive” language in calls to Iowans — based on “undercover telephone traps” recorded by a staff member posing as an Iowa woman with a history of donating to charitable causes.

Public Safety Council LLP, an affiliate, a subcontractor and the organizations’ owners, J. Michael Callan and Robert T. Callan of Minneapolis, agreed in December to an Assurance of Voluntary Compliance in Iowa. Callan companies also conducted telemarketing campaigns for the Iowa Association of Chiefs of Police and Peace Officers and for the Iowa State Police Association. The charitable organizations agreed the telemarketers could keep 84 or 85 cents of each dollar raised.

In March, Associated Community Services of Southfield, Mich., signed a consent judgment and agreed to pay $35,000 into Iowa’s consumer fraud enforcement fund after representatives of the company were recorded misleading Iowans when soliciting on behalf of Vietnam Veterans of Iowa Inc. Disciplinary actions imposed on telemarketers in other states do not disqualify them from operating in Iowa or calling the state’s residents but can heighten awareness inside the Consumer Protection Division.

“The registration law was proposed by this office, in large part, in order to require the ongoing provision of what amounts to evidentiary data to assist the attorney general in ensuring that fundraisers not engage in deceptive solicitations,” Brauch said.

2 cents to charity

For Iowans who respond to telemarketing appeals for out-of-state charities, revenue agreements can be even more unfavorable than the in-state splits.

GiveRight Inc. of Los Angeles calls Iowans on behalf of the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va., which bills itself as America’s “leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.” GiveRight often enters into fee- or expense-based contracts. To satisfy the legal requirements of some states, GiveRight estimated in most cases its expenses would claim 98 percent of all funds raised. GiveRight offers charitable organizations the services of its six divisions, including a Manila, Philippines, call center, which provides a “low-cost solution for reinstating longer lapsed donors …”

In January, executives of the Nature Conservancy, a national organization based in Arlington, Va., signed a contract with Fine Line Communications, a Canadian telemarketer based in Winnipeg. A copy of the contract on file in Iowa provides for the Nature Conservancy to approve scripts created by Fine Line for calling prospective donors, including those in Iowa. Because states require different levels of disclosure, a short script was created to satisfy the laws of Kentucky and Massachusetts.

If donors ask what percentage of their contribution goes to the Nature Conservancy, the scripted response is: “We are not paid a percentage of any donation raised for the Nature Conservancy, but rather a flat fee per person we speak to, regardless of whether or not you choose to give. The Nature Conservancy directs 76 percent of all funds to conservation programs. The difference is allocated for administration and fundraising costs.” While the Nature Conservancy may operate on 24 percent overhead, that fact is not the answer to the donor question: How much of my donation goes to the charity? The revenue split between Fine Line and the Nature Conservancy is 95/5.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has made it very clear that government cannot regulate the percentage of a donation that must go to the charitable purpose vs. fundraising. The court has said that is an issue of free speech,” Brauch said, “but the court has also made it very clear that solicitors may not engage in misleading solicitations.” Brauch said no single source dictates the appropriate split of donations. “The right test is determined by each and every individual donor,” he said, “but it seems from our discussions with Iowa donors that 25 percent is a reasonable line.”

No contract on file between any charitable organization and professional fundraiser sets out a 75/25 split favoring the charity. In most contracts, the ratio is flipped, so that at least three-fourths of all donations are retained by the telemarketer.

CHECK IT OUT: Financial records between telemarketing companies and Iowa charities

Best in show

The most favorable arrangement on file involved Iowa Public Radio, which received 61.4 percent of $46,799 raised by ComNet Marketing of Medford, Ore., for a one-year campaign. Iowa Public Radio depends on telemarketers for only about 5 percent of its annual revenue, said Kelly Edmister, chief administrative officer. It enjoys a more beneficial arrangement because it shops around.

“We go through (a request for proposal) process,” Edmister said. “Our goal is always to improve the quality and effectiveness of our fundraising efforts.”

Because Iowa Public Radio is charged by the Board of Regents with reducing its dependency on state and university funding, “we’ve always got to find the better deal,” Edmister said. So Iowa Public Radio is switching from ComNet to Phone Bank Systems of East Lansing, Mich. “What we found in our most recent change is it was more efficient to go to a per-call charge vs. a per-hour charge,” Edmister said. “We can limit the expense, because we can monitor the calls they make and … say, ‘Don’t make anymore calls this month.’ ”

She said Iowa Public Radio hopes to net $70,000, or 65 percent of the anticipated revenue, in response to telemarketing by Phone Bank Systems.

Not that lopsided

Asked if he thought Iowans would be as generous when contacted by a telemarketer if the fee splits were disclosed, Scofield, president of the Iowa Professional Firefighters union, hedged. “I’m not real sure,” he said. “That’s their choice. We don’t pressure anybody. … If people ask (the telemarketer), ‘How come you’re getting three-fourths?’ and they explain they have expenses, they might (donate), and if they don’t, that’s fine.” Bottom line: “It’s an agreement that we make and we agree to, and I am comfortable with it,” Scofield said.

Scofield challenged the idea that the splits are lopsided. “On the surface it appears lopsided, but really it’s not,” he said. “It takes money to run a business. … “You have to remember the fundraising company we employ (Center Stage Attractions), they have to pay their employees, they have to pay for their space, they have to buy all the telephone lines …”

And sometimes, telemarketers have to pay their fines.

A look at Iowa charity telemarketing agreements

The Consumer Protection Division monitors telemarketers with this undercover phone. When the phone rings, a legal secretary waves the stop sign to quiet the office, and the call is recorded (top). The phone number has been covered for the photograph. Photographed Tuesday, May 10, 2011, in Des Moines. (Liz Martin/The Gazette)

If the staff of Iowa’s Consumer Protection Division has a favorite ring tone, it’s the one that halts workplace chitchat.

“We have a special telephone that only certain individuals are authorized to answer,” said William Brauch, 54, special assistant attorney general and director of the division.

The phone has as an old-time bell ringer. When it rings, everyone knows it’s the “undercover line,” and everyone — except the caller — knows the drill.

“Whoever is taking the calls often will hold up a STOP sign, which is a signal to the rest of us to keep our voices down, because it most likely is a charitable solicitor on the phone,” Brauch said. “We want the caller to believe they are calling someone at their residence.”

More precisely, Brauch’s team wants callers to believe they are talking to someone who has a history of parting with money when called at home by strangers.

To bolster the illusion, the state has succeeded in getting an undercover name and phone number on lists that circulate among telemarketers. The state primes the pump by making four or five charitable contributions in small amounts every month.

“Phone calls soon follow,” Brauch said, and the audio recording rolls.

LISTEN: A pair of telemarketers call the Consumer Protection Division’s ‘undercover phone

• Undercover phone trap 1
• Undercover phone trap 2

The most recent undercover-telephone-based action against a telemarketer concluded March 31 with the announcement of a settlement with Associated Community Services of Southfield, Mich.

The Attorney General’s Office had accused Associated Community Services of violating Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act by implying that calls made on behalf of Vietnam Veterans of Iowa Inc. were made within Iowa and by failing to disclose it is a professional fundraising company.

In a call recorded in April 2010, a solicitor told a would-be donor: “All the money stays local for the veterans here in Iowa.”

The contract between Associated Community Services and Vietnam Veterans of Iowa provides for an 80/20 split that favors the telemarketer.

The company agreed to change its marketing practices, comply with Iowa laws and pay $35,000 to the state’s consumer fraud enforcement fund.

Brauch said the undercover phone was first used in the early 1990s in investigating and bringing criminal charges against people engaged in sweepstakes and other telemarketing scams that targeted the elderly.

“We asked real Iowans if we could have their phone number transferred to our office,” he said. “They would get a new unlisted number … and the state would pay the expenses” temporarily.

The Consumer Protection Division identified potential partners from consumer complaints made by the adult children of older Iowans, he said.

“We researched the law at that time to ensure what we’re doing was lawful and within bounds of the ethical guidelines governing lawyers and found out it was, in fact, lawful and entirely ethical as a law enforcement tool,” Brauch said.

The other key issue in taping telephone calls is consent. Iowa is a one-party-consent state. If one of two parties in a call consents to it being recorded, that party need not tell the other about it.

“The issue of undercover taping has been taken up many times by courts and has found to be a legitimate and ethical tool,” Brauch said.

Brauch said Iowa’s undercover phone trap became a model for the FBI and other states. A library of tape recordings made in Iowa provided the initial content for a national telemarketing tape library that is housed in Chicago and overseen by the federal government.

Eagle is getting 80/20 and 75/25 revenue splits, favoring his company, Charity Services Inc. Unlike out-of-state companies, Eagle said, he is providing something of value to donors and a genuine service to 14 charitable organizations across Iowa.

“Basically, we are selling (trash) bags to raise funds for the groups,” he said.

Eagle, 50, has been operating Charity Services with many of the same clients and donors since 1990.

“I wish I could say I make some killer bucks. It’s nothing spectacular,” he said.

In his annual financial disclosure to the Attorney General’s Office, Eagle reported raising $273,974 through telemarketing. His clients, which include the Jaycees in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City/Coralville and North Liberty, received $59,651.

Eagle’s expenses included $38,223 for trash bags and light bulbs. He paid drivers $45,200 to deliver bags and bulbs from Anamosa to Ankeny and beyond. He listed phone expenses at $3,085. He and four part-time telemarketers split $87,922. Insurance, payroll taxes, accountant fees and miscellaneous expenses ate up the rest.

Eagle said he also works at a funeral home.

“We’ve had to scale down,” he said. “It’s expensive to do this. The bags have gone up four or five times in last couple of years. I can’t ask for more donations to cover the cost of bags. We’ve been absorbing it. The delivery cost has gone up as well.”

Levi Good, new president of the Iowa City/Coralville Jaycees, said he inherited the arrangement with Charity Services and did not know the revenue ratio. Eagle lists it as 75/25.

Good said the Jaycees do most of their own fundraising but use Eagle’s company to supplement revenue. Good said he was satisfied to receive $13,474 of the $53,894 raised in the name of the club by Eagle last year.

“We don’t put any work into it,” Good said.

“The weakness of this registration of fundraisers only, as opposed to charities, is that if a charity does not use a paid professional fundraiser, it is much more difficult for us to possess information about its fundraising activities, including how much it raises and how much goes to the purpose and how much goes to fundraiser expenses,” said William Brauch, chief of the Consumer Protection Division.

“We’d like to be able to arm Iowans with the information they need to prevent the fraud in the first place, to put them on par with residents in the 40 states who require charities to register,” he said.

Iowa requires professional fundraisers to register if they work with an Iowa charity or if they call on Iowans on behalf of an out-of-state organization.

Any Iowan can request financial information from a commercial fundraiser. By law, it must be provided within one day.

Cedar Rapids police chief Greg Graham.

Cedar Rapids Police Chief Greg Graham says police departments around the state are sensitive to the consequences of shuffling a problem officer from one community to another.

He noted a “lack of consistency (in Iowa law) in requiring law enforcement agencies to conduct … background checks and certify that the candidate is of good moral character.”

Determining the track record of an applicant with experience in a different community police department sometimes requires creative resourcefulness.

“I can tell you plenty of stories where the employee left their agency and even had a nondisclosure agreement and because the right questions are asked of the right people, the information gets disclosed by someone not party to the agreement,” Graham said.

Even though police departments appear to find ways to skirt restrictions on sharing disciplinary files, “the problem is sometimes we are not asked,” Graham said.

“Smaller departments sometimes do not do a proper background investigation and that is what allows officers to float from one place to another.”

The contrast between the Public Records Law in Iowa and at least one neighboring state is stark.

Courts in Wisconsin apply the law in support of “the public’s interest in disciplinary action taken against public officials and employees, especially those employed in a law enforcement capacity. …”

As a result, misconduct frequently is illuminated. Government accountability can be measured incident by incident.

In Iowa, citizens almost always remain in the dark about misconduct unless criminal charges reach court.

The University of Iowa suspended Hunninghake with pay last April. UI did not immediately announce its suspension of the distinguished professor of medicine, nor that it started an investigation that would last several months.

His salary accrual has since surpassed $300,000.

The fact the university was investigating the professor-physician for child pornography likely would not have been known if Hunninghake had not faked an assault on himself in Illinois and reported the alleged crime to Chicago police 11 months ago.

UI officials shared confidential information with police who were investigating the fake assault, but the local porn investigation did not come to light until February when the Daily Iowan checked Chicago police records. (Hunninghake eventually pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in connection with the report of the fake assault.)

Wisconsin’s law allows the public to know about incidents of the type that go unreported in Iowa.

In a current case, a Wisconsin educator had pornographic images on his work computer — starting four jobs ago.

Caught viewing porn at work in 2005 in his role as a Madison school district coordinator, Christopher J. Nelson was allowed to resign for health reasons. He then worked in three other districts and was superintendent of the rural New Holstein district in January when he was arrested for allegedly using an online chat room to set up a sexual encounter with an undercover Milwaukee cop posing as a teenage boy.

In Iowa, disciplinary files are off limits to parents, voters, taxpayers and journalists in every town along a public educator’s path — unless criminal charges flush them to daylight.

Wisconsin parents could have learned the truth about Nelson, but the districts that hired him resignation after resignation either did not check his disciplinary files from Madison or did but hoped for better results.

In another incident, an officer honored as Police Officer of the Year by an association of Wisconsin school administrators, engaged in a sexual relationship with a female motorist he stopped for a traffic violation.

Despite warnings and a suspension, Officer Jason Laurin called the woman hundreds of times on his police cell phone. On duty and in uniform, he met her for midday trysts, which could have delayed his response to 911 calls.

After months of investigation, Laurin was allowed to resign and the Two Rivers Police Department agreed to keep the reason confidential.

The public learned about his misconduct because a reporter asked for his disciplinary file.

If an Iowa officer in similar circumstances applied for law enforcement work in another community, the dates of his employment and the fact he resigned would be about as much information as Iowa law allows his previous department to confirm.

Wisconsin doesn’t make the release of records contingent on a crime having occurred. The courts have placed “great importance” in disclosing disciplinary records of public employees who violated “significant work rules.”

“Some conduct affects public safety or welfare or public funds,” said Ruth Cooperrider, Iowa’s acting citizens’aide/ombudsman.

“The public may have interest in knowing if a law enforcement officer used excessive force and that person goes on to another job and becomes a problem at the new agency, or a city clerk who mishandled money and ends up working for another city and has similar problems,” she said.

“Wouldn’t it have been good to know that this person had issues?”

Kathleen Richardson, a Drake University journalism professor and executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, said the section of the Public Records Law that allows government to keep personnel records confidential “has turned into a black hole in which all sorts of information is never released.”

Government employees, like private sector employees, get in trouble for any number of reasons, Richardson said.

“The government employee then ends up agreeing to leave employment as opposed to being fired, but then just moves on down the road to another community and gets a similar position and it comes up later, perhaps when that person does something even more egregious, that this is a pattern of behavior that didn’t come to the public’s attention because it was cloaked in secrecy of the exceptions to the Public Records Law.”

Joseph E. Hamm, a music teacher at Northwest Junior High in Coralville, resigned in 1996 after being charged with sexual harassment. He eventually was placed on a year’s probation for making sexual advances toward a 14-year-old girl.

His plea deal resulted in his criminal record being expunged. And, because Iowa law prohibits release of disciplinary files, Hamm’s past went undetected when he was hired in 1999 as a music teacher at a Kansas City, Mo., high school.

Two years later, Hamm pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 7-year-old boy whom he had kidnapped and sodomized.

l l l

Iowa’s Public Records Law has a lot to say about personnel files and disciplinary records. In aggregate, the words deny public access to the details of inappropriate behavior.

Attorney General Tom Miller uses Sunshine Advisories posted on the Iowa Department of Justice website to sum up the application of the law in most situations.

“Information about an employee’s promotion or pay increase is public, but performance evaluations or disciplinary records may be kept confidential,” Miller wrote in one advisory.

Miller’s words suggest a degree of custodial discretion. But, disciplinary records simply do not reach the public unless they become evidence in a court case.

Every recent Iowa legislative session has witnessed the effectiveness lobbyists for cities, county boards, school boards and public employees have in blocking or watering down bills that would make state and local government more transparent.

“They’re all — I don’t want to say they’re trying to keep records closed, but they certainly don’t have a spirit of openness and certainly not a spirit of expanding the openness as it is in the current law,” said Chris Mudge, executive director of the Iowa Newspaper Association.

Cooperrider, the acting state ombudsman, said it was her agency that “introduced this idea of opening the personnel records to include disciplinary action.”

As far back as 2002, the proposed measures would have released records when a public employee had been discharged, suspended, demoted or docked pay, Cooperrider recalled. The nature of the misconduct also would have been identified.

“It was much broader when we first introduced the idea,” she said. “Then, over (legislative) debate and discussion,” the amount of information proposed for release was limited to “discharged.”

A bill introduced in the Senate this year gave up on the idea of finding out what the employee did and settled for language that would have made public only the fact that some final disciplinary action resulted in discharge.

After “debate and discussion,” the bill was amended to make public only the fact the employee’s discipline had resulted in discharge — and then only after the employee had exhausted “all applicable, contractual, legal, and statutory remedies.”

The public eventually might learn an employee had been fired months or years ago, but not what the employee did and not until every appeals process had played out.

The bill passed the Senate but has not been taken up by the House.

l l l

The move toward disciplinary disclosure advanced in Wisconsin in part as a result of court interpretation of existing laws, according to Bob Dreps, a First Amendment lawyer in Madison.

Wisconsin’s Court of Appeals resolved any ambiguity about legislative intent in 2006, ruling in a case about a state conservation warden’s disciplinary file:

“When individuals become public employees, especially in a law enforcement capacity, they should expect closer public scrutiny, which includes the real possibility that disciplinary records may be released to the public. …

“Previous case law on this topic firmly reflects the public’s interest in disciplinary action taken against public officials and employees …

Generations of Iowa lawmakers effectively have said the privacy of disciplined government employees, including those who teach children and those assigned to protect public safety, trumps the public’s right to know when they’ve been disciplined.

As a result, Iowa’s Public Records Law also shields state and local government from public reaction if unenforced warnings or superficial investigations were revealed in disciplinary files.

“We’re all aware of the fact we live in a time when people are suspicious of government and government officials even to the point of hostility,” said Richardson.

“Anything that government body can do to operate in a manner that is open and accountable goes a long way to diminishing the public suspicion,” she said.

“The more transparent government is in its dealings … the more faith the public has that their government is being run in an appropriate manner.”

Nor is his office blocking creation of an Iowa Public Information Board, proposed annually since 2008 to strengthen enforcement of openness laws, Miller said.

“We’ve supported that,” Miller said in an interview. “Obviously, we think we can do a lot or all or most of this (enforcement), but we’re not standing in the way of the agency. We are not opposing it, indeed, we’ve supported it.”

Two hours later, in a Capitol conference room across the street from Miller’s office, his chief of staff spoke against the latest bill to create an independent board, faulting its structure, size, functions, due process and legal authority.

Deputy Attorney General Eric Tabor also questioned whether the board was necessary.

“We have a pretty good system that’s working,” he said.

The following week, Miller’s office proposed a new board limited to offering “informal resolution” and “informal guidance” in records and meetings disputes. The board would have no independent staff lawyers or enforcement powers.

To Iowans who seek stronger enforcement of the state’s openness laws, the contradictions were a frustrating reminder of deeply rooted resistance to change and shifts in power.

“I’ve heard over the last three years why this (a board) wouldn’t work,” Sen. Jeff Danielson, D-Waterloo said during the Feb. 24 hearing attended by Tabor, lobbyists and lawmakers. “Yet, Iowans still wonder why officials say ‘no’ to them when they ask for documents. This (bill) gives Iowans the ability to say, ‘I’ve had enough.’”

Opposition to the bill was the latest example of, “it’s a great idea, but I’m going to find every way not to do it,” Danielson said in an interview the next day.

“That posture breeds cynicism,” he said. “I don’t think we can stand by and do nothing. …

“The opposition in this case was talking about a public information board, but in general, when you follow open meetings-open records over the last couple of years, the chief opposition are bureaucracies, elected officials and public agencies.

“The irony of that for me is they are the ones who continue to oppose change.

“The bigger irony for me in this process is they should be the ones who should uphold and encourage the value of an open exchange of information.”

Iowa’s Public Records Law is plagued by “miserable, terrible problems,” according to the man who wrote the last major overhaul of the law more than a generation ago.

“There are dozens of weaknesses,” said Arthur Bonfield, associate dean at the University of Iowa Law School. “The Public Records Law needs to be redone. There’s no question about it.”

More than three years ago, Bonfield drafted another comprehensive update based on the findings of a bipartisan committee whose 10 members worked on the project for six months.

The heart of the proposed revision is a board or agency independent of the Attorney General’s Office.

The proposal also would increase access to the disciplinary records of government employees and resolve the legal status of preliminary drafts of government documents.

That caught the attention of the local governments and state agencies of whom more openness would be required and against whom enforcement would be directed.

The proposal failed to get sufficient legislative traction in 2008, 2009 and 2010. An admittedly weaker version has struggled again this year.

Keith Luchtel, who lobbies on behalf of the Iowa Newspaper Association, has observed locally elected officials struggle with openness and access.

Local governments are sensitive about violating employee privacy or suffering the embarrassment that can accompany public knowledge of misconduct, he said.

“I have been a city attorney in the past,” he said of his role in Clive, a Des Moines suburb. “I know it’s sometimes a situation where you want to do right thing and are afraid to. People don’t trust their own judgment. The inclination is to take the conservative road and do nothing. … It’s easier to hold a record than release it.”

Luchtel sounds more like a psychologist than a lawyer when he analyzes the behavior he has observed.

“There’s a tendency I see, which I don’t understand,” he said. “Good people want to step up and be on boards and councils and serve the public. They’re sincere. But yet there’s a tendency to think they can do that better if the public doesn’t really understand what they’re doing. …

“The natural inclination is, ‘I don’t want to make a fool of myself.’”

Openness advocates say that inclination is no basis to deny Iowans access to police reports; city, county and school board contracts; e-mails of government officials; audits; payrolls; internal investigations; and employee disciplinary files.

When access is denied, enforcement should follow — but too often doesn’t, they say.

“We’ve been very open about the fact that we have frustrations with our current attorney general,” said Chris Mudge, executive director of the Iowa Newspaper Association.

Miller, attorney general for 28 of the past 32 years, has heard it all.

“What examples do they give?” he asked. “If there’s a good case, we want to bring it. We’re anxious to bring it … We stand at the ready.

“The thing is, we’ve gotten very few cases.”

John McCormally, an assistant attorney general tapped by Miller in December 2008 to “enhance enforcement and compliance” with the open meetings and public records laws, says he spends about 25 percent of his time on such matters.

Taking a violator to court is hardly ever necessary, he said in an interview.

“What we see, especially in smaller communities, people who are aggrieved with municipal or elected officials will want something to club those people with,” he said.

“We always try to weigh the question, ‘is this good use of our resources and the court’s.’

“Sometimes we think, ‘boy, a District Court action,’ which is what this is, ‘is such a big stick and our office in particular carries such clout, maybe there’s a better way to solve this than filing action in District Court.’”

As a result, McCormally says he has no record of his most common and effective enforcement action — phone calls.

“You try to reason with people,” he said. “That’s the strength I bring to this.”

The Attorney General’s Office hasn’t taken an enforcement case to court in years. Rarely are violations serious enough to require even a voluntary compliance agreement, McCormally said.

A typical agreement “essentially says if this happens in the future, we will file an enforcement action. It’s sort of a warning,” he explained.

Finally, “if there’s a problem with transparency, the electoral process does a good job of sorting that out,” he said. “To me, that’s the system working.”

In her role as acting state ombudsman, Ruth Cooperrider is the recipient of many public complaints about compliance.

Her office listed 544 open meetings, public records and privacy complaints from 2008 through 2010. Investigations substantiated 89 violations, she said last week.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think our open meetings-public records laws have kept up with the times,” Cooperrider said.

“There’s some ambiguity, a lack of clarity or silence on certain issues,” she said. “That makes for a difficult time enforcing when the law is unclear or does not speak to a particular issue.”

In his Iowa City office, Bonfield expresses great respect for lawmakers and the legislative process. As an optimist, he’s not likely to give up on the need for reform. As a realist, he won’t harm his chances of future success by criticizing those who might be responsible for past frustrations.

Asked why the legislation he champions hasn’t fared better, he replies, “Politics,” and declines to elaborate.

Cooperrider also is cautious.

“Unfortunately, the name of the game over there is compromising. It’s the political reality of legislation,” she said.

The fight has been “as frustrating for me as anybody else,” said Sen. Pan Jochum, D-Dubuque, the sponsor of this year’s bill to create an Iowa Public Information Board. “Getting there has been much more difficult than what I hoped it would be.”

The state newspaper association lowered its expectations this year, Mudge said, “because we hit our head against a wall for three years and are not getting anywhere. …”

Asked why improving public access through stronger enforcement has proved so difficult, Mudge replied:

“Primarily it is because of the magnitude and the efforts of the local government lobby.”

Larry Pope, a former majority leader of the Iowa House and retired professor at the Drake University Law School, is a lobbyist whose clients include the Iowa League of Cities, the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities and the Metro Waste Authority.

Pope’s attendance at hearings about bills that might alter the open meetings-public records status quo can be counted upon.

He joined Jochum, Danielson, Tabor and a roomful of others last month when discussion focused on Jochum’s bill to create a public information board with enforcement powers.

Pope expressed his clients’ “very serious concerns.”

He described the proposed board as time-consuming, duplicative, gerrymandered, unworkable and possibly tying the hands of the attorney general.

Given the opposition to that bill and to similar measures in recent years, Pope was asked in a recent interview whether his government clients are fundamentally against any measure to improve access and accountability.

“No, that is not our position at all,” Pope said. “We are willing to look at reform that would, in fact, create more transparency, give citizens more opportunities to get more information. …

“This is fifth year this issue has been on the front burner. There are a half-dozen bills in front of the House and Senate. Some create a new state agency with enforcement powers. We’d be opposed to those.

“Others would beef up the Ombudsman and Attorney General’s Office and enable them to do the work. We’d be supportive of that.”

By Steven R. Reed, The Gazette