Problem? Call Agriculture

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Problem? Call Agriculture				August 13, 2005

I’m here to tell you that Rube Goldberg is alive and well and living in the subterranean maze that is home to many of Virginia’s bureaucracies. Like some Kafkaesque administrator, Rube is in charge of the pernicious processes that make hash of too many laws or policies and mincemeat of the citizens they catch in their masochistic mechanisms.

Consider, for instance, the case of the poor woman who called the Last Word to complain about a filthy bathroom at a Lightfoot gas station. Quite beyond the ignominy of having to use the men’s room because the ladies’ room was out of commission, she found no lights, no toilet paper and was accosted by a horrid stench. Logically, she called the health department to complain. Illogically, a spokesman pronounced that they didn’t handle such complaints. She should, he told her, call the Virginia Department of Agriculture.

Department of Agriculture? Who in his right mind would consider calling the Department of Agriculture to report a dysfunctional gas station bathroom in Lightfoot? Unless someone is growing illegal pot in there, how is it the business of the Department of Agriculture to deal with crummy toilets?

But it gets better. Recently a friend of mine reported that he was receiving nuisance phone calls from a timeshare outfit in Williamsburg. Being up on Virginia law, he told the first telemarketer to remove his number from the group’s list, as was his right under the Virginia Telephone Privacy Protection Act.

After three more calls from the same telemarketer, my friend decided to take action. According to the act, any citizen can, with the help of various state or local agencies, sue violators and collect $500 for each prohibited phone call.

And this is the point at which Rube begins to crank up his machinery.

A call to the James City County attorney’s office brought the response that they don’t handle such claims.

Well, let’s try the State Corporation Commission. They have a division dealing with consumer inquiries about electric and telephone service. From them came the news that the law was still in effect, but that they did not handle complaints or violations of it. Why not try – guess who? – the Department of Agriculture!

As it turns out – and Rube is certainly behind this – the Department of Agriculture is now called the Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services. Evidently there are so few farmers left in Virginia that the Department of Agriculture is being kept afloat by gripes of all sorts from disgruntled citizens.

Unlike our reader who encountered the putrid pissoirs, my friend was not laughed at by the good people at Agriculture, but rather was sent a complaint form to fill out. Now we’re making real progress, he thought.

But wait. On the first page of the form, the complainant is informed that the Department of Agriculture “does not offer advice, provide legal representation, or pursue matters in court on behalf of individual complainants.”

Oh, really? How then, pray tell, does one collect his 500 bucks per violation? If the county attorney and the agri-consumer dolts won’t take these marketing molesters to court, who will? What good is 500 smackers if you have to hire your own attorney?

If I were in this predicament, I’d put my money on commonwealth’s attorney Mike McGinty. After checking the law, McGinty agreed that his office could act on behalf of the complainant, carry out an investigation and request not only the $500, but attorneys fees as well. McGinty agreed, however, that the law is puzzling, in that it puts him in the strange position of having to defend an aggrieved party.

The problem with all this is that individuals who are harassed by telemarketers or offended by scruffy bathrooms have to crawl though Rube’s tubes, troughs and tunnels to sleuth out where they can find redress and restitution for their problem. What good is a law if its bowels are so murky that you can’t find your way through all the curves of its intestines? Or if those who are supposed to be its advocates either know nothing about it or refuse to help?

It’s almost as frustrating as the Rube-like laws regulating the accreditation of public schools on the basis of SOL scores. For the second year in a row the spinmeisters at the Department of Education have decreed that history SOLs don’t have to count if a school is in danger of losing full accreditation. If, however, the test scores help a school, they can be counted.

In addition, just last Wednesday our educational Swift Boat truth squad announced that they were lowering the passing scores for the tests in math and English.

These are standards? If kids do well, count the scores. If they don’t do well, either can the scores or lower the passing bar.

If you give a test that too many kids fail, all you have to do to jerry-rig some hunky-dory, turkey-brained concept of success is scrub those scores from the tallying mix and serve up the accreditation pie.

If you think that’s on the aardvark level of logic, call the Department of Agriculture and get one of those complaint forms. Not that it will do any good, but at least they’ll know that we taxpayers realize we’re getting rolled once again by the Rubes in the Department of Education.