This bill is the greatest piece of idiocy to come down the pike in quite a while. You know, people wonder why we’ve lost 145,000 jobs from Philadelphia in the last 20 years. If people would spend as much time trying to help develop industry in this city as they have trying to fight it, we’d be a lot better off.
Finally, you should be appraised of the need for security and secrecy to research and develop products. In many, many instances, such security would be unattainable under Bill 270. The lack of privacy and security would strike the hardest at our great and large corporations which research and develop most of the new products which enhance our health and quality of living.
It is a bad bill based on undemonstrated premises. It will accomplish nothing constructive in Public Health value, but rather will do a great deal of harm to the City’s business and commerce, and most importantly, its economy.
I feel that the sponsors and endorsers of Bill 270 have been "taken in" by the spurious and irresponsible claims of its drafters. I very much fear that those drafters are motivated by a "zero-risk" philosophy which is impossible to achieve….Not only is it unnecessary, but attempting to achieve "zero-risk" can destroy business and commerce.
Our concern is that too many regulatory bodies are reacting to this need and that divergent or contradictory rules would be established which would in effect create chaos for the designers, builders and operators.
Each grain handling facility is unique, and the state of the art is constantly changing. Further, historically very little scientific research has been done on some of the fundamental questions involved in grain dust explosions.
Not only is disclosure of this confidential trade secret data unnecessary to safety and health protections but raises serious questions regarding the taking of private property without compensation and due process in violation of Constitutional rights.
[I]t is conceivable that this trade secret data would be considered so valuable that a company would elect not to do business in Philadelphia rather than disclose it and so I have detailed our concerns on the issue of confidentiality.
OSHA at best has been a major disappointment, at worst an abysmal failure…To date there has been no solid evidence that OSHA has yielded any gains in safety or health.
Nobody has proven cotton dust is a source of disease….In forty years, we’ve not had one single employee…disabled because of a respiratory problem.
