Wisconsin is expected to join more than 24 other states next week with a state-run telemarketing do not call list when Republican Gov. Scott McCallum signs the state’s multi-billion dollar budget for fiscal 2001-2003 into law.
Legislation creating the program, which is supported by a $231,000 appropriation was adopted earlier in the year. Since then more than one quarter of the state’s nearly 1 million households have asked to be placed in the do-not-call list.
The governor’s budget includes an unspecified appropriation for the operation and maintenance of the do-not call list by the consumer affairs division of the state attorney general’s office.
But some lawmakers, like Democrat State Sen. Jon Erpenbach are wondering if the program will be adequately funded in the governor’s budget. McCallum, who has been under pressure from the state’s telemarketing industry to either veto the program in its entirety or at the very least water it down, has been mum on the subject.
“The governor has an opportunity to show whose side he is on,” Attorney General Jim Doyle said in a statement. Doyle also asked whether the governor stands “for protecting consumers from overzealous telemarketers who call Wisconsin residents at home at the worst possible time, or does he stand for out-of-state telemarketing firms that seek to bombard senior citizens and working families with don’t take no for an answer attitudes.”
Doyle, claiming that the telemarketing industry’s voluntary do-not-call list program “doesn’t go far enough because there are clearly telemarketing companies that do not” follow it, urged the governor provide adequate funding in the budget for the program.
Meantime Erpenbach and several other lawmakers have expressed concern that the governor, under pressure from the telemarketing industry, might use his line-item veto powers to reduce the penalty provisions of the law which subjects telemarketers to fines of between $1,000 and $10,000 for calls to anyone on the do-not-call list. The fines will help to finance the program as it grows.
McCallum was also mum on that subject as well.
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