Second steps
03/29/7
It's true. Opportunity actually does spring from crisis sometimes.
Taking that old saw a step further, we can also safely say that ironic twists of political fate sometimes produce unintended but nevertheless welcome results.
Such is the case involving 70-year-old Gerry Ann Schabarum, who died earlier this month from a staphylococcus infection that, because Schabarum also suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, was able to take hold in her body and finally kill her.
Schabarum, wife of former state Assemblyman and onetime Los Angeles County Supervisor Pete Schabarum, apparently contracted the bacterial infection while getting a pedicure.
Her death came about one year after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a consumer protection bill that set regulations on the state's 290,000 licensed manicurists and cosmetologists.
Authored by Democratic San Francisco state Sen. Leland Yee while Yee was still a member of the Assembly, the bill was drafted after California had seen what Yee described as “hundreds of women reporting cases of rare bacterial infection linked to pedicures and manicures.”
Yee's Assembly Bill 409 requires only visual inspections for cleanliness at the thousands of nail-care emporiums around the state, but does allow the state Board of Barbering and Cosmetology to suspend licenses without advance hearings and requires licensees to be placed on one-year probation and take remedial training in health and safety laws when found in violation.
But now, after reading about Gerry Ann Schabarum's story in the Weekly two weeks ago, and those of other victims of these types of infections, Yee is apparently ready to take things to another level.
As Deputy Editor Joe Piasecki reported two weeks ago, state health officials have investigated outbreaks of bacteria and staph infections in several Northern California counties over the past two years that officials believe may have taken the life of a 43-year-old woman. And in Texas, a 46-year-old Fort Worth woman apparently also died from a staph infection caused by a pedicure.
In a statement released Monday, Yee credited the Weekly with breaking the story on Mrs. Schabarum's situation and called for tougher conditions to be placed on the state's thousands of licensed manicurists and cosmetologists.
Calling AB 409 “a good first step,” Yee said the state now needs more inspectors and better testing to adequately address the problem.
“Currently only visual inspections are made at nail salons; I plan to pursue further legislation that will require bacterial testing at salons to make sure consumers are protected from potentially deadly infections,” Yee is quoted in the prepared statement.
So much for good growing from bad. Now for the irony.
Pete Schabarum was a county supervisor until 1991. Before that, he was a Republican Assemblyman. While a supervisor in 1990, Schabarum wrote Proposition 140, an initiative imposing term limits on legislators.
The law, which Democrats are now trying to change, limits terms to eight years in the Senate and six in the Assembly. Democrats want to change that to just 12 years, but with all of those years spent in one house.
But in its current breakdown, Yee, a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and three-term former Assemblyman, was forced out of his Assembly seat last year and ran for a seat in the Senate.
In November, Yee became the first Chinese-American elected to the Senate in 156 years and replaced Jackie Speier, who was also forced out due to term limits.
Who knows where Yee's consumer protection law would be today had he not been elected to the Senate.
But on the other hand, we would like to think that Pete Schabarum would be happy to see Yee advance to the Senate (just as Proposition 140 allowed him to do) where Yee has vowed to complete work started in the Assembly on a law that could prevent anyone from suffering the same fate as Gerry Ann Schabarum.
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