Dozen rules marked for repeal in regulatory cleanup

Rhode Island Air Pollution Control Regulation No. 42 never helped nor hurt anyone.
It was written in 2001 to fill a potential gap in federal emissions standards for certain heavy-duty diesel trucks that never actually materialized.
Yet even though the rule, dealing with model year 2005 and 2006 engines, never did anything, it remained on the R.I. Department of Environmental Management’s already lengthy rulebooks.
This year, Regulation No. 42 was one of 12 Rhode Island rules identified by state agencies for repeal as part of an effort, started by the General Assembly last year, to clean up the state’s regulatory environment.
Because it is superfluous, Regulation No. 42 is the low-hanging fruit of Rhode Island regulatory reform and DEM is now going through the process of eliminating it.
But doing away with many of the other state regulations now in effect won’t be so easy.
The dozen regulations recommended for repeal came out of 838 total rules – more than half the 1,642 total rules in the state – examined by their enforcing agencies in the first 120-day phase of regulatory review. Another 25 regulations were picked out for amendment and 28 were described as duplicative.
Leslie Taito, director of the R.I. Office of Regulatory Reform and leader of the current review initiative, said in addition to the regulations put on the chopping block by the agencies themselves, her office would be adding its own recommendations to the list by the end of the year.
“We found more we would like to look at – some are duplicated elsewhere and there are some areas where they could clean them up for clarity,” Taito said.
With Rhode Island’s rocky business climate in mind, state lawmakers last summer ordered all state agencies to, within four years, analyze each regulation on their books to determine its cost, impact on small business and whether it could be eliminated.
Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee sped that timeline up to 480 days, with the first of four review phases ending at the end of 2012 and the last ending at the end of this year.
Getting rid of burdensome and counterproductive regulations is the highest-profile part of the Regulatory Reform Initiative, but the work done just to better understand the regulatory climate may be its greatest contribution.
In the initiative’s first progress report released in August, Taito’s office identifies a number of deeper issues than a few antiquated regulations like No. 42. Only 27 of the state’s 47 agencies complied with the initiative’s requirement to analyze their regulations – although they were the big ones and accounted for more than 90 percent of the total rules. Among those who did comply only about half included the proper economic-impact statements.
Even when agencies did the analysis required, the report said they struggled to estimate how many small businesses, and what type, were affected by the rules or how much compliance cost them.
Agencies responding in the first round of regulation analysis found 91 regulations had an impact on small business, but when Taito’s office reviewed the submission, it found an additional 88 regulations had a small-business impact.
With these “bad data” problems in mind, Taito said the next stages of the initiative would include mapping the regulatory landscape and seeing where different agencies overlap.
Vibco Vibrators President Karl Wadensten, who has led a regulatory reform effort at the R.I. Economic Development Corporation’s board, likes where the initiative is going but thinks the regulation changes proposed so far are only a small part of what will eventually be recommended.
On top of repealing superfluous regulations, Wadensten said the hard work of making the remaining rules easier to navigate, understand and comply with could be even more important.
The Office of Regulatory Reform is analyzing the readability of each regulation on the Flesch Reading Ease index and will work with agencies to make particularly opaque rules clearer.
The initiative’s first progress report estimated that it would take someone reading all day five weeks to get through all 26,240 pages of Rhode Island regulations.
This summer’s initial progress report came out more than six months after the end of the first review period and Taito said now the pace of releases will accelerate.
Another progress report covering the second four-month period is being prepared for release in September and a report for the third period, which ends at the end of this month, should come not long after that.
Taito said about three-quarters of the regulations have already been reviewed. •

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