We estimate it will take approximately 9 man-months to meet the law’s mandates for each plant. Considering that E. F. Houghton has six plants in the United States, it would consume 4 _ man-years to meet S.51’s proposed paperwork burden.
It will require many small businesses to go through an additional costly and time consuming process of collecting and analyzing information. The benefits of doing so will not significantly improve the protection of human health or the environment.
To expect well over half a million small businesses to adhere to these extensive requirements would be regulatory overkill.
What you are trying to put on business is overkill. It’s going to kill farmers and small business people.
The cost potential is very, very significant, in the billions of dollars on Pennsylvania employers….The small businessman, the farmer, is going to have to live with a more severe standard...the cost to them is going to be very phenomenal.
Please, dear legislator, do not eliminate my job because you have put the business places in Pennsylvania in a noncompetitive situation where we cannot compete with Ohio, New York, New Mexico, and so forth. Pennsylvania should have our laws consistent with other States so that our manufacturers can continue to employ our neighbors, our sons and grandsons and granddaughters, so that we can work in Pennsylvania, so that we are not driving our people out of the Commonwealth.
I have a greater concern – the concern for rural America, the concern for suburban America, which is a concern for the communities that you and I come from….It goes too far, Mr. Speaker. It puts a burden on our small business places….Think about the small business people, the nonmanufacturing entities, that all of a sudden are going to be forced into reporting requirements and the cost of doing business that is going to put many of them under.
When the City Council was considering the right-to-know law, lobbying was intense. Those opposed to it argued that the tough regulations would drive businesses from the city. That threatened exodus has not happened.
The public does not have [an] inherent right to know.
When the public hears about right-to-know, they think ‘Gee, that sounds great’. But all the information they’re going to get under these laws is a list of plant chemicals that will sit on someone’s kitchen table until it’s thrown away.
