[Opticians] Option 3 legislative report

[Tim Alden]

September 6th, 2006 
 
In answer to the concerns raised at spring convention. 
  
At the spring convention of 2003, Bill Gregory motioned to proceed with
option 3. 
The motion was amended by Glenn Charles to be a feasibility study of
pursuing option 3. 
The motion passed with the amendments. 
A committee was formed.  Members were, Diane Charles, Dan Riley, Maureen
Irey, Dennis Prescott, Cathy Nguyen, and Ginny Lashley. 
We met and decided that the only way to continue with option 3 was to be
able to expand the educational opportunities across the state.  In other
words, to have our program in more colleges across the state. 
At the fall convention we presented our report, and said we were still
unclear how we were going to expand the education piece of our plan. 
We met with Lisa Thatcher and Judy Haenke.  Also, Pam Lovinger from the
DOH.  They recommended contacting the Technical college people. 
We knew it would require major legislative action as it is a substantive
change in our law.  Our lobbyist at that time cost @ $36,000. per year.
It would require many, many meetings across the state to get ALL
licensed and non-licensed opticians on board with the idea.  It would
require reactivating the Pac Fund for donations to many legislators. It
would require an extremely active grass roots effort to get active on
every legislative campaign in this state.  Our best guess is it would
increase our dues by @ $100. per member per year for the duration.  We
believed it could not be started without continuing. And we were unsure
of putting a time line on this issue.  We knew our opposition would be
the corporates and the optometrists, and believed some of our own
members would be unhappy with this issue 
I talked to Michelle Andreas from the Technical college group.  She did
some research and came up with the opinion that at that time we were a
flat industry.  She based that on the fact that there was no waiting
list for entry into our existing program, and that there were very few
want adds in the papers of the 5 largest counties in the state.  As
money was very tight in the state budget, they could not at that time
see expanding into other colleges across our state.  She did recommend
reinvestigating in @ 3 - 5 years. 
At our spring of 2004 convention, the committee made a report, that we
recommended not pursuing option 3 at this time, and that we recommended
not putting a time line on this issue, but to revisit it at a later
date. 
At spring of 2005 the committee made their final report.  We realized it
would be a several year process to pursue option three.  We believed we
completed our request from the members of doing a feasibility study.  We
recommended that a new committee be formed to pursue other avenues of
education in our state and continue looking at option three in the
future. 
  
Thank You 
Diane Charles 
 
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