To me it is just damned incompetent to consider legislation without knowing what the cost is going to be. In business we couldn’t do this. We couldn’t have jobs if we ran our business that kind of way.
Then without regard for exposure concentration in the air, City Council is being asked to make it against the law to ‘receive, store, use manufacture or transport’ any substance on that list without first burdening the citizen and the City Administration with more red tape.
Council Bill 270 sets up rules of the game which do not apply anywhere else. The members of this committee, as well as the many others in this room concerned with Philadelphia’s economic well-being, know that we already have a major problem in attracting industry to our city as well as a problem in maintaining our basic industrial job-base.
I think you know as well as I do that when you get legislation like this, you very often feel this is the nose of the camel. Okay, they start off with this and then they expand it a little further, and then the next thing you know they are taxing industry to pay for the cost of the regulatory apparatus that’s being established. And the first thing you know, you’re really being asked to preside at your own funeral.
You are going to ruin our business. And I think that’s pretty serious.
There already has been too much public hysteria over half-truths concerning nuclear energy, PCBS (polychlorinated biphenyls), industrial wastes, etc. What we do not need is for the City Council of Philadelphia to help in the slightest to create even more public hysteria.
[W]e all probably use salt, sodium chloride, on our food….Salt has been included in the Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (published by NIOSH). The toxic dose of salt needed to kill half the test animals is about 1/8 ounce of salt for each 2.2 pounds of weight of the animal. Does this mean that the City of Philadelphia should regulate table salt?
So that a bill like the Right to Know Bill is not in itself definitive; it would not drive all of these businesses away. It will bear more harshly on some than others, and may expedite their rate of closing or leaving or – and very often it’s not even a question of driving a company away, they just don’t expand here. They go and expand somewhere else.
[S]mall business today is struggling to swim upstream against today the constantly increasing current of restriction and regulation. I suggest that adding to this burden should be only done with the greatest of considerations for the benefits to be achieved, since each addition to the pressure will result in some businesses either giving up or changing their location.
Adding another layer of government regulations onto these federal programs which provide substantially similar protection to employees and the public as those proposed in the bill is wasteful, inflationary and unnecessary.
