State Bill Would Revamp Rules on Rehab Centers

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Owners and operators of drug addiction treatment centers are up in arms over a bill in Sacramento that could give local officials more tools to shut them down or block new rehab facilities.

Currently, small operations with fewer than seven beds are generally exempt from local regulation, but Assemblyman Richard Bloom, a Democrat who represents Malibu, home to several clusters of rehab centers, has taken steps to slow their proliferation.

He has introduced a bill that would require the state Department of Health Care Services to license all current and future facilities and prohibit the department from licensing two unrelated facilities within 300 feet of each other.

That’s of concern to rehab center operators in Malibu such as Richard Taite, founder and chief executive of Cliffside Malibu. Taite said several drug addiction treatment facilities in Malibu and dozens more up and down the state are within 300 feet of another center, including his own.

Whether these centers would be declared ineligible for licenses and be forced to relocate or shut down remains a question.

But the bill goes even further. It would change the definition of an “integral facility” to include any physically separate facilities that use common contractors or have any common ownership (such as a board member serving on the boards of multiple treatment centers).

Bloom said he proposed this because in recent years, investors have bought up adjacent properties and created compounds with as many as 18 beds.

“This is not what the law intended and actually undermines both the therapeutic goals and the surrounding neighborhood,” he said.

Rehab center operators fear they would be subject to local zoning and conditional-use permit requirements if two small separate facilities not immediately adjoining each other end up being considered one larger facility.

Given the growing pushback against drug addiction treatment centers from some community activists, that provision could be just the tool they need to force some centers to shut down or block new sites from opening. Taite noted that such activity is ramping up in Malibu and at least a dozen other Southern California communities.

“It’s not just about closing down necessary addiction treatment centers and making it more difficult for new ones to open,” Taite said of the bill, “it is part of a war on treatment that puts the needs of a wealthy few ahead of the needs of millions of Californians desperately in need of treatment. It is an example of ‘not in my backyard’ run amok.”

Bloom’s bill is now awaiting a hearing in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, its last stop before the Assembly floor.

Toxic Mess

After years of business complaints about runaway litigation over the state’s Proposition 65 toxic chemical notification law, the Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment has come out with regulatory changes intended to limit the spread of lawsuits.

But according to a coalition of 170 business groups led by the California Chamber of Commerce, the latest revisions would do the exact opposite, increasing the risk of lawsuits.

The issue at the center of all this is the notice businesses must post warning customers and the general public that products or processes at the location use chemicals the state has defined as toxic. This has spawned a cottage industry of plaintiff attorneys filing lawsuits alleging that the warnings companies post are inadequate.

The OEHHA is attempting to remedy this by saying all that’s required is that the warning notices be “clear and reasonable.” But this, the coalition says, can open the door to a whole new category of “bad warning” lawsuits over what is clear and reasonable.

The agency is still revising the regulations, with a final version due out in November.

Overtime Gain

The U.S. Department of Labor last week finally issued its regulations doubling the salary level threshold over which workers can be exempted from overtime requirements, which will impact an estimated 4.2 million workers nationwide.

The Business Journal flagged this pending development last month. At that time, the latest draft available put the salary threshold at $50,400; the final version released last week dialed that back a bit to $47,476. Also, the draft version contained no exact implementation date was given; last week’s final version set the date as Dec. 1.

The ruling is not expected to have as much impact in California as elsewhere. That’s because the threshold here is set at twice the minimum wage, currently $41,600 a year; in most parts of the country, the threshold is $23,680. As a result, only an estimated 140,000 California workers would be directly impacted by the higher federal threshold. That number will shrink Jan. 1 when the salary threshold in the state jumps to $43,680 with a corresponding hike in the minimum wage.

Staff reporter Howard Fine can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 227.

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Howard Fine
Howard Fine is a 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Business Journal. He covers stories pertaining to healthcare, biomedicine, energy, engineering, construction, and infrastructure. He has won several awards, including Best Body of Work for a single reporter from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers and Distinguished Journalist of the Year from the Society of Professional Journalists.

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