rug Price Posting Act. It requires the posting of sixty of the most ed prescription prices in the drug store and also requires pharmacists answer telephone inquiries. The Board of Health regulates funeral st itemization-a bill that was passed this session. A new commission as been established to enforce cable television regulation. We are gog to franchise cable television at a municipal level but we are going > have some statewide regulation of the franchise.

These bills have passed this session. I think that they have drastically spanded the consumer protection role in the State of Minnesota but hey have also made much more apparent the problems that this fragentation has caused. In addition, we are talking about some fairly ajor pieces of legislation in the next session.

Unit pricing has passed one house of the legislature and is in a com-
ittee in the Senate. We are very interested in the California systems
of licensing automobile and electronics repairmen. Drug price adver-
ising is not dead yet. Several things have been proposed. One is the
onsolidation of consumer protection activities into one large Consumer
Protection Department, and that would probably include the entire
Commerce Department, the current Office of Consumer Services, the
Attorney General's responsibilities for dealing with false advertising,

he open dating in the consumer protection field of food, part of the
Department of Agriculture, the Weights and Measures Division of the
Department of Public Service, and all the non-health licensing boards.
These would be consolidated into one large consumer regulation office.

In addition, separate from that, there would be a very small consumer advocacy office which would not have any laws to enforce. Their job would be a gadfly job and this is one of the things that the Office of Consumer Services in Minnesota has been most effective at. They have had very little legal force for their workup until this session of the legislature, but they have been very effective in prodding the legislature, business, and various groups to act in a way that is more helpful to the consumer.

It has been suggested that the various health boards, pharmacy, nursing, medical examiners there are twelve of them at least-be consolidated under the Board of Health and that their actual regulatory powers be given to the Board of Health which would have a representative from each of these boards. The individual boards, which are dominated by the industry that they are intended to regulate, would act in an advisory capacity to the Board of Health; but the Board of Health, in which that industry would be the minority, and the health professions in general would be the majority, would be the one with the actual power.

This is the kind of thing we are talking about in Minnesota and we are talking about a vast expanding of the consumer protection role in the state. We are running into great difficulty because of the fragmentation. What we are looking for is a consolidation of these activi

129

247

DEPOSITED BY THE

ties so that, as the gentleman from Dallas said, the consumer does no have to guess which department his complaint should go to. He can call up the Department of Consumer Services and they will figure i: out. If they cannot figure it out, if it is too ambiguous, they have some body right there who is prepared to take care of it anyhow.

:

a

un"

IT

MR. D. OFFNER (St. Louis, Missouri): There is great concern by a large part of the membership of this Conference about the propensity for state legislatures to move ahead independently in fifty different ways in regard to establishing certain standards. You have mentione! two that come to mind. One is open dating; the other is unit pricing. is the feeling of a great many of us that activity on the part of legisla tures in these fields should be guided by a uniform model because you can see the chaos that we can come into if adjoining states that are supplied from the same source have different standards in regard to things like unit pricing or open dating or many other things. I woul? like your comment on this.

Senator KEEFE: That is a great problem from two points of vier It is a problem as you have expressed it. It is also a political problem in that it is the most commonly used argument. We had lobbyists wh went to the City of Minneapolis and said you should not pass a pricing ordinance, you should let the state do it. They came to the stat and said you should not pass a unit pricing ordinance, you should le the Federal Government do it. I do not know what they tell the Federa Government. If we are not careful and we listen to those arguments no one will pass such an ordinance.

One of the things we did put in our open dating statute which passe was an automatic repeal of the provision which would allow the Com missioner of Agriculture to accept in lieu of the state unit pricing open dating requirements any reasonably strong Federal requirement" or requirements from another state. I think that is a very good poir and it is a difficulty the City of Minneapolis is getting into. They passe both open dating and unit pricing as ordinances and the rest of the state has not followed them as yet on unit pricing. It may put Minneap olis businesses at a disadvantage, although an interesting thing is or major chain of supermarkets in Minneapolis is unit pricing voluntari and has been for some time.

Mr. L. LEENERTS (Purex Corporation): Does the Minnesota Polle tion Control Agency, which has a division of special services recently passed a law that would prohibit the introduction of a nem product in the State of Minnesota made of anything except paper come under the Omice of Consumer Services? Where does that fall?

Senator KEEFE: That comes under the Pollution Control Agenci' and what you have just described is a surface explanation of an et

whicl

ATION 392

v tremely complicated political problem that we had in this last session

of the legislature. There is very strong pressure to pass a ban-the-can con ordinance to ban nonreturnable beverage containers. There was

* strong opposition to this from industry and labor. What came out of POT the session was a very complicated bill which was intended to ac

complish some of the goals that ban the can was intended to accomplish without instantly putting people out of work. This was the fear that people had. What we have now is a law that says if you want to introduce a new package, a new nonpaper package, in Minnesota, you take it to the PCA, the Pollution Control Agency. They tell you whether they think it is a good idea or not. If they think it is not a good idea, they can ban it, but only until the next session of the legislature. Then it is up to the legislature itself to decide whether or not these packages are a threat to the environment.

MR. LEENERTS: Do I understand this piece of legislation correctly? If you ask for an exemption on this, does the agency have 150 days to reply?

Senator KEEFE: I do not know. I am sure you are right if you read that.

MR. LEENERTS: I have the guidelines here. I agree that fragmentation by states makes interstate commerce rather difficult.

SENATOR KEEFE: I understand that. We are faced with a very interesting difficulty here and it is a political difficulty. Legislatures, as you know, are not so much interested in whether this or that sort of regulation will be easy to administer, or even sometimes be administrable at all. What they are interested in is what their constituents perceive they want. That is even removed a little by the fact that their interests are what they perceive their constituents' interests to be which may not be accurate either.

On the other hand, the criticism that is made of regulatory agencies nit pf is that any agency that regulates an industry spends much of its time pr

in contact with the representatives of those industries, so they tend to
become more sympathetic to the industry. I think there is bound to be
a constant conflict between legislators and the people who have to en-
force legislatures' laws.

MR. M. TRUJILLO (Puerto Rico): I would like to make some com-
ments that might be helpful in your endeavor in the next legislative
session. We have a consumer affairs department that has very wide
authority. One of the problems we faced was the multiplicity of agen-
cies dealing with consumer affairs. You will see that many of the
agencies cannot really be consolidated because they have other func-
tions. So the umbrella would be just too big.

In order to cover both the consumer end of the problem and also the

need for a separate agency, our law provides that the Secretary of rol 4s Consumer Affairs can oversee the enforcement of any and all con

sumer protection laws. What happens is that if the law is under the

me.

ΓΟ7

Yout

requis

graphy on excitation Processes gh 1973)

Ther

e rest

thing

esota?

rices on ofa

rept po that fel

i of ar

131

DEPOSITED BY THE

jurisdiction of another agency, he refers the notices of violation to that agency for prosecution or adjudication. The complaints are handled in the same fashion. For example, if we receive a telephon complaint we refer it back to the Public Service Commission for ad judication. We also have a strong legal arm within the department We have a legal bureau that has two divisions, the hearing examiners division and the trial division. They are both kept separate to keep the adjudication function of the department separate from the enforcement function, in order to comply with current constitutional doetrines. We have the authority to represent consumers before any court For example, the telephone company requested an increase in their rates and our department filed a motion to intervene on behalf of every single consumer of Puerto Rico. So we consolidated certain function but others had to be left where they were. Our department has the au thority to either refer to them complaints and violations or to partic ipate in their procedures on behalf of the consumers.

SENATOR KEEFE: Where to assign your priorities in state govern ment is a very difficult problem. I know that one of the people on the Governor's Advisory Council has raised the question of whether en vironmental protection is really also consumer protection. The troubt is that if you are too broad in your determination of what consume protection is, then you will have only one department of state gover

а

V

SIT

ment.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON LIAISON WITH THE

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Presented by M. GREENSPAN, Chairman, Supervising Inspector,

Department of Consumer Affairs,

New York City, New York

أن م.

(Wednesday, July 25, 1973)

The Committee on Liaison with the Federal Government submits its report to the 58th National Conference on Weights and Measures. The report consists of the tentative report as offered in the Conference Announcement and as amended by the final report.

The report represents recommendations of the Committee that have been formed on the basis of written comments received during the year and oral representations made during the

open meeting of the Committee. The Committee 1. I. intends to maintain the line of communications already established

with Federal agencies and to aggressively pursue all matters involving Sr. Federal and State relations in the weights and measures field.

xcited
blides:

OIML

The United States officially became a member of the International Organization of Legal Metrology (OIML) in August of 1972. The U.S. delegation attended its first plenary session in October of that year. The activities of the OIML interface with NCWM, particularly with regard to commercial weighing and measuring devices.

A United States National Committee is to be formally established to assist the U.S. delegation to OIML. The National Conference has been requested to appoint a representative to sit on the National Committee and the Conference's Executive Committee was requested to name such a representative. The first representative is Mr. James F. Lyles, Supervisor of the Weights and Measures Section, Division of Product and Industry Regulation, Department of Agriculture and Commerce, Virginia, for a period of two years. The official representative will report on activities through this Committee. It is the understanding of the Committee that the United States National Committee for (IML will be made up of both government and private industry representatives in the same fashion as membership in the National Conference on Weights and Measures. The Committee would like to commend NBS on this approach which allows all interested parties a voice in weights and measures matters. The Committee would also like to endorse a pol

133

DEPOSITED BY THE