Update February 3, 2021
Quite a bit has been going on since we last provided an update. Here’s the latest news.
Here’s the TL;DR
- HB234 extends HB749 inspection provisions and is good. And on its way to being enacted.
- Billings city council decided to move forward with the establishment licensing ordinance, but referred it to a committee to hammer out the details. A group is working on trying to get them to consider another idea that repurposes the language of the ordinance to leave massage therapists out of it. And unexpected outside help arrived on the scene!
Legislative News
It’s Montana legislative season again and the 2021 session is in full swing. We’re monitoring several bills to ensure that they don’t affect us. For example, we want to know what’s in a bill to “generally regulate physical therapy” to make sure they don’t do anything to us. After last session, we’ve added human trafficking bills (remember how bad HB749 was until we got involved?).
HB234 is the only bill of note so far.
Prior to the session we heard from Rep. Mallerie Stromswald who wanted to revisit HB749. That bill codified a board rule into law that required that massage therapy licenses be posted. And it allows someone to come in and inspect just for that. The BLMTB Board supported the final bill last session and we didn’t see a problem with it. The provision was set to expire soon and Rep. Stromswald wanted to see it continue. There was also a technical glitch: State law enforcement (LE) felt that they couldn’t inspect because the law said local LE could. We intended for all LE to take a look-see, so we didn’t see a problem with that change either. This is a good change as it allows the human trafficking task force LE officers to better do their job.
Deb Kimmet, Executive Director of the BLMTB, and Wendy Marsh, who worked on HB749 in 2019, testified for the bill at the first hearing. HB 234 passed out of the House Wednesday. It’s an uncontroversial bill – it passed 3rd reading with a 98-2 vote.
As it moves to the Senate side, if you’re so inclined, do please contact your senators, particularly those on the judiciary committee to support the bill: https://leg.mt.gov/web-messaging/
Interestingly, besides Daniel Zolnikov, who originally sponsored HB749 in 2019, no one else showed up to testify – not even those from the human trafficking task force that is so keen to pass establishment licensing in Billings.
Billings Ordinance Update
Things are not quite as rosy with the Billings ordinance. The city council, despite therapists’ best efforts, decided to move forward with the ordinance, but referred it to a committee composed of 2 proponents and 2 opponents to hammer out the details. The public was invited to provide comment to the 4.
If you remember from the previous updates/alerts, the BLMTB opposes establishment licensing because it makes us responsible for the problem, sexualizes massage therapy, and undermines all the work we’ve done over the years to be respected as a health care profession. We’ve seen an uptick in callers looking for sex and the jokes and innuendoes have drastically increased. On top of this, proponents are telling us that the ordinance is not targeted at us – one blatantly said that we didn’t need to follow the law. But that’s not how laws work – you can’t tell one group that they have to follow the law and another that they don’t. Besides, it’s unprofessional conduct for an LMT not to follow the law.
Susan Carlson, BLMTB Board member, and Deb hosted a virtual meeting to determine and develop next steps. Out of this emerged a local task force of several Billings therapists with a plan to move forward. This group has put forward an alternate ordinance that actually targets the problem. Instead of telling us not to behave like bad actors, the alternate ordinance tells the bad actors not to pretend to be like us.
The alternate ordinance penalizes businesses that should be classified as a sexually oriented business for misclassifying themselves as another type of business. This will keep the brothels disguised as massage businesses (BDAMBs) from hiding out as massage businesses, nail salons, or modeling studios, just to name a few. They should be classified as sexually oriented businesses, not because there’s sex there, but because there’s nudity, scanty clothes, and other sexualized behaviors going on there. Sex acts on clients (prostitution) remains illegal even in sexually oriented businesses.
To see what we came up with, take a look here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gysh1m32u5qdz78/New%20HT%26P%20Proposal%20ver.2021_01_27.pdf?dl=0
We’re asking the city to take a different focus. These illicit businesses are pretending to be something that they are not. Instead of focusing on the business they are pretending to be with establishment licensing, why not actually get at the root of the problem? We’re asking them to stop victimizing legally practicing therapists with burdensome provisions that further entrenches the idea that sex and massage are related. It is time that we break that cycle and develop laws that target the law breakers, not the profession – the legal practice of massage therapy.
Unexpected Help
The Yellowstone County Republican party has decided to step in and give us a hand. They are pro-business and see the ordinance for what it does: It hurts massage therapists. Their help is very welcome. For example, they gave us a heads up about a myth/facts posting done by Councilwoman Penny Ronning and the local anti-trafficking group, then posted our response – by posting our graphic on their FaceBook page and by sending our rebuttal in its entirety to their email list of 7k people.
Here’s the graphic and our full rebuttal is at https://blmtb.org/news/billingsmyths/
That’s it for now. We’ll keep you posted as more news emerges.
Update February 3, 2021 Read More »