Watch VideoState regulator says no to licensing massage therapists
Story By: James Jarman
Source: KOAA
Despite law enforcement expressing the need for licensing and regulation in the massage industry, the state department that would regulate massage therapists has told state lawmakers that regulation is not needed. The recommendation was made last year in a Sunrise Review of an application for state regulation. The report does not mention human trafficking.
As we've reported over the past few months, the massage therapy industry, along with Springs Metro Vice and the El Paso County Sheriff want licensing and regulation to help clean up the industry.
In November we heard Sheriff Terry Maketa say that without regulation, no matter how many busts officers make the illegal operations continue to flourish in unincorporated El Paso County. "Having some type of regulation, some type of licensing would dramatically turn the tide to our favor and that's what we need if we're really going to have an impact on these operations," Maketa told News First.
State regulation and licensing is the Department of Regulatory Agencies responsibility, but in it's 2007 report to lawmakers it recommended the state not regulate massage therapists, because the review didn't uncover public harm.
News First asked Department Executive Director Rico Munn if anybody from his agency ever traveled outside of Denver, perhaps Colorado Springs or El Paso County to see the situation there, before writing the review. "I can't tell you whether or not we physically visited some of the counties or some of the buildings, but again we weren't looking at massage parlors because they're not part of the massage therapy," he said.
He repeatedly made that point -- that their review looked at massage therapy not massage parlors. State law defines as parlors as places where massages are given by people who didn't graduate from a massage therapy school.
So looking only at therapists, regulators didn't find a lot of problems or complaints.
News First: "But if nobody's keeping track of who's a therapist, who's a not a therapist, who claims to be a therapist but is really a prostitute -- if there's nobody keeping track of that how's the consumer supposed to know where to go to even file a complaint, where would they file a complaint?
Munn: "Well currently there's no mechanism to file a complaint."
Meanwhile 38 other states are regulating the massage industry in one form or another. Munn said Colorado isn't one of them "because no one's made the case to us and to the legislature that the type of regulation their looking for would address the harm we're talking about."
He says they haven't heard about the human trafficking problem. As we've reported, local and federal authorities claim trafficking goes hand in hand with prostitution rings using the massage industry as a front.
As far as creating some regulation to address that problem, Munn says he's not opposed to it. "I'm happy to sit down with law enforcement and have that conversation and there are a variety of ways states can regulate these types of things," he said, "Thus far we have not heard a case made for the type of regulation that would address the problems that they're facing."
