Kansas consumers will receive more than $1 million in loan write-offs and account credits under a settlement reached last week with a company that targeted sales of jewelry and other items to military families, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt announced today.
USA Discounters, which also did business as USA Living and Fletcher’s Jewelers, sold consumer products, including furniture, appliances, televisions, computers, smart phones, jewelry and other consumer goods principally on credit. USA Discounters typically marketed to members of the military and veterans, advertising that military, veterans and government employees would never be denied credit for goods purchased from the retailer.
Schmidt and the attorneys general of 49 other states recently reached a settlement with the company to resolve allegations that it engaged in unfair, abusive, false and deceptive acts and practices. These allegations include that, in collecting on consumer debts, USA Discounters engaged in abusive tactics, constantly contacted service members’ chains-of-command and caused some service members to lose security clearances and face demotions. The states also alleged that USA Discounters filed its collection lawsuits in Virginia jurisdictions, no matter the service member’s location, deployment status or residence. This made it difficult or impossible for service members or their families to travel to another state to represent themselves in court in these collection proceedings.
In addition, the states alleged USA Discounters sold overpriced household goods at high interest rates, often using the military allotment system to guarantee payment. These unlawful business practices, the states claim, were secured through misrepresentations and omissions in advertising, during the loan’s origination, and during the collection process.
Virginia-based USA Discounters closed its stores in the summer of 2015, including a store in Junction City near Fort Riley. It later declared bankruptcy, and the states’ settlement agreement has been filed as part of the bankruptcy proceedings.
“The high stress and burden placed on military families are not an invitation for businesses to engage in deceptive practices,” Schmidt said. “Our Kansas consumer protection laws include special protections for military families and veterans, and this settlement will return money to those families who did business with this company.”
USA Discounters agreed to provide relief to certain former and current customers. The total estimated value to consumers for these restitution measures to Kansas consumers is more than $1 million, primarily benefiting active and veteran service members. Namely, USA Discounters agreed to:
• Write off all accounts with balances for customers whose last contract was dated June 1, 2012, or earlier, and correct the negative comment from the company on those consumers’ credit reports;
• Apply a $100 credit to all accounts whose contracts were dated after June 1, 2012, which were not discharged in bankruptcy, and correct the negative comment from the company on those consumers’ credit reports;
• Write off all judgments not obtained in the correct state, and correct the negative comment from the company on those consumers’ credit reports; and
• Credit all judgments that were obtained in the correct state against members of the military with a credit equal to 50 percent of the original judgment amount.
Affected consumers will be contacted regarding their eligibility for restitution. Consumers who believe they are eligible may also contact the attorney general’s Consumer Protection Division at (800) 432-2310 or online at www.InYourCornerKansas.org.
This is a busy time of year for one of the nation’s foremost chimney sweeps.
Jeremy Biswell, president of the National Chimney Sweep Guild for the past year, is also the owner, with his wife, of Fluesbrothers Chimney Service at 1701 Southwest Blvd., Kansas City, Kan.
At this time of year, after a rainy summer and as cold weather approaches, some residents are having their chimneys inspected for safety, as well as repairing chimneys and installing fireplaces, gas fireplaces and woodstoves, according to Biswell.
“Chimney repairs are popular this year because there was a lot of rain,” he said. When chimneys start to fall apart, a home can have water damage as water enters through the damaged area, he said.
Water can be the worst attacker of chimneys because of the freeze and thaw cycle, he said. Some of the older homes may have vents from furnaces and water heaters through the chimney. When chimneys fail, flue gases and carbon monoxide can be the result.
Chimney service companies and chimney sweeps also play an important role in fire safety in the home.
“Having a controlled fire in your home is a dangerous thing,” Biswell said.
He said he is frequently asked how often should a homeowner have a fireplace looked at. He then asks the last time it was looked at, and the answer often is “never.” If that’s the case, the fireplace needs to be looked at now, he added.
“If you’ve never had it checked out, not used it, it’s best to start with an inspection,” he said. A certified chimney sweep will run a camera inside the fireplace and chimney, give you a report and show you photos to document it, he said. Then they will give a recommendation and estimate.
Besides working on chimneys and gas stoves, the staff at Fluesbrothers also can clean dryer vents, which can cause more fires than chimneys, and clean gutters.
Chimney sweeps are trained and certified, Biswell said, and Fluesbrothers has the largest Chimney Safety Institute of America-certified staff in the metropolitan Kansas City area. About 15 people work at the business. Biswell is certified as a Master Chimney Sweep by CSIA.
“For us it’s a dangerous job, too,” he said. “We’ve got to do a lot of safety training.”
Chimney sweeps work at heights, and sometimes it’s raining. They train for each situation. “Nobody should get hurt on the job,” he said.
Technology has made chimney sweeps’ jobs safer through the years, he said. Cameras are now used to view the condition of the inside of chimneys. In the future, drones with cameras may be used to get a closer look at different portions of a house, including the chimney and roof, he added.
Having a fireplace and chimney inspected can reduce the risk of fire in homes, according to Jeremy Biswell of Fluesbrothers. (Submitted photo)
The road to the top
Biswell said that when he was growing up in Louisburg, Kan., he never imagined that one day he would be a chimney sweep, let alone president of a national organization. After high school, he went to nursing school, where he met his wife, he said. He found it very hard to find a job in the nursing field, so he went to work for Chris Cakes making pancakes.
He began looking at businesses he could start, and chimney sweeping came up as a possibility. There were not many chimney sweep businesses in the Kansas City area, and many were part time, he said. He went to school to get certified, and met some people in Wichita who owned a chimney sweep business, he said.
When he was in Wichita doing a pancake event, he would spend some time riding the truck with the Wichita business owner, learning the business, he added. About 16 years ago he started his chimney sweep business in the Kansas City area.
“I really lucked out on a lot of things, call it an act of God,” Biswell said. “I kept landing with the right place and the right people.”
He eventually got so busy with his small chimney sweep business, operated out of his home then, that he had to quit Chris Cakes, he said.
The business went from being in the garage of his home to a storage unit in the Kansas City, Kan., area, he said. Eventually they rented a place near Woodyard BBQ, then they moved down the street to 1046 Merriam Drive, across from the Boulevard Drive-in, he said.
His wife started working with the business, in the office, and it grew to the point where it was a 3,000-square-foot shop. Now they own their own building at 1701 Southwest Blvd.
“I love KCK,” Biswell said, “it’s why I have the shop here. They’re normal people, good hard-working people, in a great area with a lot of history.”
The business receives a lot of walk-in traffic, he said, from homeowners who want to ask questions, or from contractors who are coming by to buy a chimney cap and install it themselves, he added. He believes having a physical office space helps people feel better about the business.
Good luck
The old saying about good luck from shaking hands with a chimney sweep makes him a popular person.
There’s also a saying that it’s good luck to get a kiss from a chimney sweep at a wedding, and he has been invited to some weddings because of those beliefs, he said.
Traveling to represent chimney sweeps
Eight years ago Biswell got a call from a member of the board of directors of the National Chimney Sweep Guild asking him if he’d like to come to a meeting. It was a good fit and he eventually worked his way up to president of the national association, he said. His wife and other staff members did much of the work at the business while he devoted time to the national association.
As part of his duties as president, he attended a trade convention of chimney sweeps in Italy this year, he said. He was able to see what the industry is like in Europe and was able to do some additional traveling.
In Europe, he said, chimney sweeping is government-regulated, and they don’t just sweep chimneys, Biswell said.
“They do a lot of efficiency testing, to keep the particulates byproducts down,” he said. For example, in Germany, where he attended a convention last year, there are more stringent regulations and a lot more efficient appliances than here, he added. A lot of countries in Europe are dealing with smaller land areas with a need for keeping the particulates down, he added.
Job opportunities in the field
“If you told me as a young man that I’d own, run and probably be one of the industry leaders, I would have laughed and laughed and laughed,” Biswell said. “No, I didn’t even fathom it. It’s amazing where life takes you.”
He said a lot of blue collar trade fields are having problems getting qualified workers now. Many workers are aging out of the system and there is a need to train the next group.
Usually, he has to train workers from the very beginning for his line of work, he noted. Even though the work picks up at certain times of the year, he said he tries to keep employees on a 40-hour week.
Even though he never thought as a child he would want to be a chimney sweep, he likes a lot about it now. He enjoys meeting people, he said.
“I like the independence,” he said. “I like the challenge of problem solving. I like the views. A lot of times, up on the roof, it’s beautiful, you get to see the city from a different angle. Once you become a chimney sweep, you’re always looking up.”
For more information on Fluesbrothers Chimney Sweeps, visit https://www.kcsweep.com/.
At his apartment in Olathe, 42-year-old Nick Fugate catches up on washing dishes and remembers the 22 years he spent doing that at a local hotel, trying to stay on top of a never-ending stream of plates, glasses and silverware.
Nick recalled minor annoyances like the long days, the hot kitchen and his fingers pruning in the water. It could be tedious, but he said he didn’t really mind.
“Just as long as I got the job done, it was fine,” Nick said.
The job wasn’t glamorous, but Nick’s father Ron Fugate said it was the key to the self-reliance he wanted for his son since Nick was born with an intellectual disability.
“From our perspective, having a job, being independent, participating in the community, paying taxes, being a good citizen — that’s a dream parents have for their children in general,” Ron said.
But all of that changed last year when Nick lost his job and did something he’d never done before: He enrolled in Medicaid.
That landed him in a state of limbo, along with thousands of other Kansans with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Savings up in smoke
Not far from Nick’s home, 30-year-old David Lee Hunter and a handful of men at Lakemary Center in Olathe take apart computers and other electronics for recycling.
Hunter thinks of each piece that passes across his workbench as a unique puzzle.
“I like to improvise, and I like to ask my co-workers for assistance,” Hunter said.
Elsewhere in the building, other individuals with disabilities shred medical documents or get job coaching. Lakemary also offers services like transportation or help buying groceries.
A few decades ago, many of Lakemary’s clients might have received Medicaid care as residents of an institution. But in the early 1980s, states began shifting their strategies to allow people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to live at home.
Advocates said this was not only much cheaper — about a third of the cost of institutional care — but it provided a vast improvement in the clients’ quality of life.
In many states, however, the first step toward getting these services is signing on to a long waiting list.
That’s what happened when Nick applied for Medicaid. In the months since, he’s had to pay around $1,000 a month out of pocket for Lakemary’s services.
It’s quickly burning through his life savings.
Like many Kansans in similar situations, the Fugates have been speaking out about the waiting list and other Medicaid problems at public forums like one in May in Kansas City, Kan.
Waiting for improvement
In a basement meeting room of the Jack Reardon Convention Center, hundreds of people with disabilities, their families and caseworkers railed against KanCare. Some even heckled the moderator.
The state has been gathering feedback because it needs federal government permission to continue running KanCare, Kansas’ privatized Medicaid program.
In 2013 Republican Gov. Sam Brownback put Medicaid under the management of three private insurance companies, promising managed care would improve services, cut waste and save enough money to end the lists for the kind of services Nick Fugate needs.
But families of Kansans with developmental disability didn’t trust the companies to provide the complicated help their loved ones needed. They managed to get the federal government to delay the switchover, but in February 2014 federal officials gave their approval and the KanCare experiment began for them.
More than two years later, many families say they’ve seen few signs of improvement, particularly in the waiting list.
Not only is there still a waiting list, it has grown by a few hundred to about 3,500 people.
Except in emergency situations, the average wait is seven years.
Complicated cases
An end to the list remains in view, according to Brandt Haehn, commissioner for home and community-based services in the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services.
“I think everybody in the system is doing the best job they can do to provide the people services,” Haehn said.
In August, the department announced it had eliminated a different waiting list: the one for physical disability services.
Although that claim has been challenged by advocates, state officials said it shows KanCare can get results.
Haehn, however, acknowledges that developmental disability cases are more expensive and complicated, and it will take time to come up with the state’s share of the total cost of $2.6 billion — about $1.5 billion — needed to eliminate the waiting list through 2025.
“Nothing would make me happier than to write a check and give all these people services, but that’s just not reality,” Haehn said. “So I have to deal with what reality is and try to use the money that I have to effect positive change in the most amount of people.”
Still waiting
Ron Fugate thinks KanCare had its chance.
“We’re not treading water; we’re drowning,” Fugate said. “And it’s not getting any better. We’ve got to start taking some serious action on this and get it addressed. We’ve kicked the can down the road too long.”
The Department of Justice is investigating the waiting lists, although it declined to comment for this story.
The state’s ability to act may be limited. Brownback’s tax cuts, which were supposed to boost the economy, have blown a huge hole in the state’s budget, leaving little money to apply to something like a Medicaid waiting list.
Meanwhile, Nick Fugate is still waiting.
His parents are in their 70s, and they say they’re now watching their carefully laid plans for their son’s future slip away.
“After 22 years, it looked like he was going to be able to complete a career, and it didn’t happen that way. And so all of this comes at a time in our lives where we’re in the waning seasons of our life, and we did not anticipate this kind of a challenge at this point.”
— Alex Smith is a reporter for KCUR, a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor team.
The nonprofit KHI News Service is an editorially independent initiative of the Kansas Health Institute and a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor reporting collaboration. All stories and photos may be republished at no cost with proper attribution and a link back to KHI.org when a story is reposted online.
