DLT backs exemptions on boiler inspections

PAPER TRAIL: Venus Pizza owner Lou Raptakis, a former state senator, shows off the 14 state licenses required for him to be in business. /
PAPER TRAIL: Venus Pizza owner Lou Raptakis, a former state senator, shows off the 14 state licenses required for him to be in business. /

Joanne Hendricks, owner and operator of the Lady of America Fitness Center in West Warwick, is still steaming over a $120 bill from the state for inspection of a hot-water heater.
“It’s abuse of power, to take a small business and charge it that kind of money and then you get nothing in return,” she said. “It is not fair.”
She is far from alone.
In response to complaints from small-business owners, dating back at least several years, lawmakers and the R.I. Department of Labor and Training are in the process of proposing revisions to the law governing boiler inspections to reduce the number of businesses that must have such inspections done.
The DLT also is changing on its own the payment structure to cut in half the fee companies must pay, from $120 to $60 every two years, according to Laura Hart, spokeswoman for DLT Director Charles J. Fogarty. Fogarty “spearheaded” the drive to revise the law and fee, Hart said, after “we heard a lot from businesses about the importance of having clear, fair regulations.”
The changes under consideration come in the wake of persistent complaints from small-business owners about boiler inspections, which business owners maintain are no longer needed on a widespread basis, particularly for simple hot-water heaters, due in part to the efficiency of modern technology.
They say the inspections seldom take more than five minutes of an inspector’s time and, usually, the inspectors simply look at the boiler/heater without performing any in-depth tests, so they’ve questioned the need for a $120 fee once every two years.
At her business, which she has owned for three years, Hendricks said, an inspector recently visited the fitness center unannounced and spent no more than five minutes checking a hot water heater located in a closet. She expected a bill of perhaps $50, but was shocked when the state sent her an invoice for $120. “I refused to pay,” she said.
She wrote instead to Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee and DLT to complain about the inspection and the fee, and she sought help from state Rep. Lisa P. Tomasso, a Coventry Democrat. “For a small business trying to keep afloat,” Tomasso said, a $120 fee can be substantial. Former state Sen. Leonidas P. “Lou” Raptakis, a Coventry Democrat who gave up his Senate seat last year in an unsuccessful bid for secretary of state, has also been critical of the costly inspections. He owns and operates Venus Pizza in Coventry.
Raptakis said the boiler inspection situation is just one example of a larger problem because, he maintains, the state is over-regulating and over-charging small business in order to raise revenue during difficult budget times. His take-out pizza parlor, he said, requires 14 state licenses every year and he said he can be fined as much as $100 for failing to renew a license on time. “This is why [businesses] don’t come to this state,” he said.
Like Hendricks, Raptakis has no boiler at his business, but a 40-gallon hot-water heater. “It makes no sense,” he said, to inspect 40-, 60- or 80-gallon hot-water heaters because these are similar to what private individuals have in their homes. “Are we going to start inspecting homes?” he asked. Inspectors, he said, come with no buckets, no tools, no testing materials and usually what they look for is proof the business has paid its taxes.
Rep. Patricia Serpa, a West Warwick Democrat, and Sen. Ed O’Neill, a Lincoln independent, have filed bills in the House and Senate and supported by DLT that mirror a measure Raptakis unsuccessfully proposed in the past, to revise state law to better define which “places of public assembly” should be required to have biennial boiler inspections.
In the past, Serpa told Providence Business News, lawmakers ran into “a little bit of resistance” from the DLT to changing the requirements for boiler inspections. “We had a hard time making DLT understand,” she said, until Fogarty took over in January. He formed an internal task force at DLT to look into the problem, a task force that included Serpa and Raptakis. As things now stand, Serpa said, businesses routinely are charged $120 for boiler inspections every two years even when inspections are “cursory” or not done at all. “Frankly, small-business people resented that,” she said.
The legislation calls for state law to be revised, so that “places of public assembly” are redefined “to eliminate a number of companies” from boiler-inspection requirements.
Neither DLT nor Serpa could say how many companies may become exempt, but they said places such as hospitals, nursing homes, schools, theaters and day care centers will still need biennial boiler inspections, while small restaurants and mom-and-pop stores that only have water heaters probably will not. The fee also will no longer be applied automatically, Serpa said, but levied only when inspections are actually done. Serpa said the legislature will hold public hearings on the changes, though none is scheduled yet.
A key concern of all those involved, of course, is public safety. The DLT, for instance, told Raptakis in a 1987 communication that, “if the pressure were to malfunction on even a 40- or 50-gallon water heater, it potentially can explode like a keg of TNT and create a large and potentially deadly explosion.”
The regulations “are there for a reason,” noted DLT’s Hart. “Safety is our No. 1 priority and all states have regulations to inspect boilers and pressure vessels.” Inspectors in Rhode Island identify problems at about 80 boilers each year, she said. Fogarty’s decision to consider revisions to the boiler-inspection program is a direct result of Chafee’s call for state government to be more responsive to small business, Hart said.
Serpa and Raptakis want to better define the reference in the legislation to places of assembly “to make sure that those places that really are places of assembly do get checked,” Raptakis said of schools, theaters, hospitals and the like. &#8226

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