Politics & Government
Letter to the Editor: Is the City Discriminating Against Massage Businesses?
In his second letter to the editor, Wally Colburn further explains massage legislation—and how he feels about it.
Wally Colburn has been a South Pasadena for 67 years. Click here to read his previous Letter to the Editor.
I am all in favor of the enactment of fair and equitable laws, ordinances and codes that govern my profession of massage therapy. In 2008 when Senator J. Oropezza of Long Beach proposed SB731 to regulate the state licensing of massage therapists, we who had been working through committees for over eight years in conjunction with the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) were thrilled to finally have the chance to have our profession listed among the other professional organizations within the state. When SB731 was passed and signed into law and went into effect September 1, 2009 the California Massage Therapy Council (CMTC) was formed to provide background investigations through the DOJ and the licensing of individual therapists.
The entire purpose of this law was to license qualified and well-trained certified massage therapists and to make their license portable and transferable so that they could move from location to location, city to city and county to county without having to go through separate background investigations and massage licensing in each jurisdiction. This portability meant was if the therapist was a licensed CMTC, he or she could work in an establishment under their existing business license. Or if they wished, they could set up their own location by applying for and receiving an individual business license in that jurisdiction.
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Yet the City of South Pasadena—as usual—has taken its interpretation to the extreme by requiring each and every massage therapist to have his or her own individual city business license—regardless of what business location they are working with. The license would be non-transferable requiring a separate business license for each location worked at.
Talk about double dipping, heck this is a downhill rolling snowball of revenue generation. This, along with its requirement to buy a city-issued name badge that you must wear at all times, borders on ridiculous. The city does not understand the nature of our work and the moving of the limbs and extremities during a session and how that plastic badge could be hazardous by causing scratches or injury to a client.
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This is not regulation but instead is an out-and-out revenue generating measure that is being borne on the shoulders of hard-working professionals, all to appease some local PAC who have too much free time on their hands and no concept of what a true massage therapist is, or how hard he or she works as a professional providing a proven and accepted alternative healthcare modality.
South Pasadena, as far as I have been able to find out, is the only city in the San Gabriel Valley to have this requirement. Most cities issue a business license to an establishment and then charge a nominal fee for each employee working under that business license. The California Constitution and the CMTC state that no city shall pass or enforce laws or codes that supersede state laws or infringe on the populace unless those laws are enforced equally to whom they apply.
If the city is enforcing a code every massage therapist must adhere to, then it must apply it equally to all businesses that provide a personal service to the public. That would technically mean that each individual working in a doctor or dentist’s office, restaurant, grocery store, nail salon, hair salon and barbershop should have a separate business license since they are providing a personal service. When there are street fairs on Mission Street, is the city going to be fair and equitable and make sure that each and every vendor at the fair have their individual city business licenses, too?
The way that the City of South Pasadena is enforcing its business licensing requirements on massage therapists appears on the surface to be discriminatory against one segment of the populace, since these requirements are not being applied equally across the board to all individuals working in a service providing businesses. Maybe it is time for the city to revisit their procedures enacted “to crack down on massage therapists.” These procedures have been fueled by hysteria and innuendo about the evils of a massage therapy business in a downtown district spread by a minority in this area.
The way the city is taking care of business on this matter could leave them embroiled in a possible discrimination law suit brought by an applicant that feels the laws are randomly enforced, cumbersome, and burdensome, cause undue hardship and on the surface are discriminatory against one particular profession.