San Diego County Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer Tuesday revealed her plan to create a county Consumer Fairness and Public Protection unit to crack down on junk fees, scams and predatory financial practices.
“Its mission is straightforward,” she said. “The new consumer unit will enforce consumer protection laws, stop illegal practices that raise costs and help residents recover money when they have been harmed.”
The county Board of Supervisors is slated to vote on the proposal on March 24.
Lawson-Remer said the Trump administration was attempting to cut funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a government watchdog agency created in 2011 after the Great Recession.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ordered the CFPB’s acting director, Russ Vought, to continue requesting funds to carry out the agency’s obligations. What that ultimately means could depend on how much Trump wants to axe the agency.
“The gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the one federal agency dedicated to fighting against big corporate fraud, is a travesty against us, normal people,” said University of San Diego Law Professor and Lemon Grove Mayor Alysson Snow. “Without CFPB enforcement, banks, credit card companies, and payday lenders steal money from the pockets of hard-working families through fraud, junk fees, and usurious rates.
“Predatory for-profit colleges and debilitating student loan debt jeopardize the future of our next generation,” Snow said. “Saddled with student loan debt, they cannot even start families, buy a home, or save for retirement. Finally, without a consumer protection defender unit, our seniors’ twilight years are dimmed by unfair business practices, like gatekeeping of health by insurance providers and identity theft and fraud scams. We need help. The county’s consumer protection program is the help we need.”
Thanks to a state law passed in 2021, cities with populations over 750,000 can have a consumer protection unit. Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties already have the units. The law grants county counsels and city attorneys the “same pre-litigation investigative tools as district attorneys, allowing them to subpoena records and other non-public information” before filing suit under California’s Unfair Competition Law, according to a statement from Lawson-Remer’s office.
Lawson-Remer’s proposal is a 20-person unit operating under the purview of the County Counsel’s office funded with settlement money.
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