Earl Faria, president of Spectrum Coatings Inc. in Providence, says he hasn’t felt the effects of efforts to streamline federal regulations for the past 25 years.
“I’ve had to fill out all the paperwork I’ve always had to fill out,” he said, adding that he spends at least 40 to 60 hours per year filling out paperwork on solvents – mostly for the R.I. Department of Environmental Management, the Narragansett Bay Commission and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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But that doesn’t mean Faria doesn’t have suggestions for how federal and state agencies could lessen the impact of regulations on his five-employee military, industrial and commercial coatings company.
Faria’s suggestions are being sought after most fervently now that the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy has launched an initiative – called the R3 or Regulatory Review and Reform Initiative – that aims to help small businesses address the federal regulatory burden by identifying and revising rules they believe are onerous.
Two things are driving the initiative, said Thomas M. Sullivan, chief counsel at the SBA Office of Advocacy. One is the $1.1 trillion that compliance costssmall businesses, not including permit fees or processing fees.
The $1.1 trillion mostly represents the time it takes small business owners to research the details of filling out paperwork for the various government agencies and the time it then takes to fill out the paperwork and send it in, Sullivan said.
The second driver is the fact that the Office of Advocacy has not been proactive in holding government agencies accountable to section 610 of the Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980, which requires agencies to review existing regulations and measure the impact on small businesses to determine whether any revisions could be made to lessen the burden.
“We have not been as proactive because it’s been more difficult,” Sullivan said, adding that it is easier to look at the rules and regulations in the pipeline to determine the impact and ask for adjustments before they are enacted.
And though government agencies are conducting roughly 1,300 reviews of their regulations per year for the RegFlex Act, Sullivan said, they are not basing the reviews on input from small business owners, which is what the R3 Initiative is geared to do.
“What we are asking is for small business owners to tell us the rules and regulations that need to be updated,” he said. “We need their constructive suggestions for reform.”
For Spectrum Coatings, the solution for reducing the regulatory burden would be to base the amount of paperwork needed on how many solvent emissions the company produces rather than the amount of solvents the company purchases each year, Faria said.
Spectrum Coatings uses 20 to 30 solvents to manufacture the coatings and paints, but the transfer of those solvents through the process is in an enclosed environment, Faria said, so there aren’t many direct emissions into the environment.
But the company still has to fill out paperwork for how many solvents it purchased, how much of the solvents it uses and how much evaporates into the air.
“It would save a lot of time if it was based on how much you emit instead of how much you buy,” he said.
Though Faria has not made this suggestion to the Office of Advocacy, he said, he would be willing to participate in the R3 discussions. Faria added that he doesn’t think revising this regulation would affect transparency of what chemicals his company uses, because anyone interested in knowing could contact the local fire department, to which Spectrum Coatings must report as well.
Sullivan is hoping to compile recommendations for reform by Dec. 31, so that his office can promote them as part of the office’s annual report on the RegFlex Act to the President and to Congress early next year.
The office also will launch a Web site to track recommendations and give two status reports a year on where each stands in the reform process, he said.
Sullivan believes the initiative will be a successful approach to solving the regulatory burden issue because of the optimism small business owners have expressed in response to the initiative.
“Small business owners have told me this is a priority for them,” he said. •
