From Sen. Nancy Jacobs:
As a member of the committee that reviews state regulations, I see stacks of proposals coming from state agencies every month that hurt small businesses. These onerous or costly regulations are passed under the radar with little transparency. Often the affected businesses don’t find out about a regulation that could damage business or cost a lot of money until it’s too late to comment.
To help correct this problem, I have just succeeded in passing a bill that requires state agencies to post proposed regulations on their website with a link on the home page.
In the next few months, farmers can regularly check the Department of Agriculture website; paint shops can go to the Maryland Department of Environment site, and charter boat captains will check the Department of Natural Resources site to see what proposed regulation could have an impact on their business. At that point they could then contest any proposed regulation during the 30 day comment period.
We need to be more business friendly so small companies can prosper, create more jobs and keep people employed. And we need to listen to business owners to better understand the effect additional regulation would have on their cost to do business in Maryland.
The new posting of proposed regulations on State Agency websites will hopefully help, but we need to do more to reign in overregulation in next year’s General Assembly session.
Testifying for this bill were Veterinarian Dr. John Brooks of Bel Air Vet Hospital, Andrew Jodlbauer of Jodlbauer’s Furniture and Joshua Brown of Elkton Plumbing Supply.
This is a step in the right direction. You wrote; “Often the affected businesses don’t find out about a regulation that could damage business or cost a lot of money until it’s too late to comment.” Unfortunately that is not quite accurate. In way too many cases the real small business has no idea until some bloviating government functionary walks in and fines the living crap out of the business for non compliance with some obscure rule, about which he or she had no knowledge.