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Payday lenders, foes differ on petition drive
Published on Sunday, Aug 17, 2008
COLUMBUS: The poor payday lending industry is being picked on by a group of people who want nothing more than to displace 6,000 workers, shutter the doors of 1,500 storefronts statewide and lower interest rates on short-term loans from 391 percent annually to a measly 28 percent.
It's a sad day in Ohio when an honest business cannot serve the public while earning a meager profit.
Last week, the anti-payday-lending crowd went too far.
They accused the Ohioans for Financial Freedom — can't you just hear the trumpets — of paying ill-informed people to collect signatures to place an issue on the ballot in November.
If they collect enough signatures, voters will be asked to repeal a recently passed law to reduce the interest rate on loans from 391 to 28 percent.
The anti-payday group had the audacity to make a series of bodacious claims about the petition drive.
They allege that circulators went to a shelter in Butler County and paid homeless people $1 for each signature. Now that was illegal even when Lyndon Johnson was running for the U.S. Senate in Texas in 1942.
At a news conference, the anti-payday-loan types played tape recordings and unveiled written transcripts of conversations with the petition circulators.
They contend the circulators, who are paid $1 per signature, are misleading the man-in-the-street to get his John Hancock.
In one of the recordings, a circulator states the issue would lower, not raise, interest rates to 1 percent.
Another petition circulator says, ''We're trying to lower the payday interest loan rates here in this state. These guys are legal loan sharks and we want to regulate them.'' He goes on to say the interest rate will be lowered to 5 percent.
This probably made the anti-payday-lenders angry for two reasons: It's not true and the circulator was stealing their line about legal loan sharks.
In another incident, according to a notarized affidavit, a woman was approached at the Polsky building at the University of Akron by a circulator and told she had to sign the petition or she would not be able to vote in November.
Now, would someone working for the Ohioans for Financial Freedom — cue the harps — do such a thing?
Case in point
Enter Bill Todd. Make that William M. Todd, Esquire, as in lawyer, not magazine reader.
You may remember Todd as the attorney with the committee that raised huge contributions from anonymous business sources and then used the money to run notorious ads against former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Alice Robie Resnick.
The commercials had personal injury lawyers throwing a stack of cash on the scales of justice. The statue in the ad came to life, pulled the cloth from her eyes and looked adoringly at the money.
This led to an extensive legal battle over the names of the donors. They were willing to pay to smear Resnick, but they didn't want anyone to know who signed the check.
It was one of those Kodak moments in Ohio election history.
Todd now represents the Ohioans for Financial Freedom — strings, please.
He went after those dastardly foes of payday lending, stating an amorphous body, ''the Committee,'' rejects any effort to mislead potential petition signers.
And Todd issued a further challenge. Show him the evidence. Turn it over to the proper law enforcement authorities.
''Vague allegations of election law violations serve only to undermine the entire electoral process,'' Attorney Todd writes in a letter responding to the allegations of wrongdoing.
Todd doesn't actually state that the anti-payday-lending crowd has made vague statements.
In other words, vague statements about making vague allegations don't serve to undermine the entire electoral process.
Recruiting and training
Kim Norris, the spokeswoman for the Ohioans for Financial Freedom — flourish of clarinets — must have had a mind meld with Todd.
She stated the same vague allegation line word for word in her news release.
Norris also points out that every single circulator is provided extensive training on their assigned tasks, including what they can say and what they can't say.
Todd and Norris ought to really show the anti-payday-lending cabal.
At the same time, the enemies of financial freedom are turning over their fancy affidavits, taped recordings, transcripts and other vague evidence of alleged circulator wrongdoing, Todd and Norris ought to turn over any information they have showing how and where the circulators were recruited and trained, what they were told to say and what they were told not to say.
Todd and Norris should demonstrate their sophisticated approach to recruiting and training an army of well-intentioned circulators who want nothing more than to provide financial freedom to the masses.
Getting answers right
While they're on a roll, Todd and Norris can antagonize the payday naysayers by asserting they and the other people behind the amorphous ''Committee'' are willing to be held legally responsible for the petition drive.
And they should tell those payday haters they're going to test the circulators before sending them out with petitions with tough questions like, ''Will the issue raise or lower the interest rate on payday loans?''
Or will they be subjected to true-and-false queries like, ''Is it legal to pay people to sign petitions?''
And if the circulators don't get the answers right, tell them they can't earn $1 a signature even if it means the payday lending industry will have to work a little harder, possibly raise another $800,000 or more, and come back at another time to ask voters to rewrite the Ohio Revised Code to let them charge up to 391 percent interest on an annual basis.
Aren't financial freedom and the electoral process and, come to think of it, sad-eyed puppies, worth it?
Now that would be music to everyone's ears.
Dennis J. Willard can be reached at 614-224-1613 or dwillard@thebeaconjournal.com.
COLUMBUS: The poor payday lending industry is being picked on by a group of people who want nothing more than to displace 6,000 workers, shutter the doors of 1,500 storefronts statewide and lower interest rates on short-term loans from 391 percent annually to a measly 28 percent.
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