[Regulations in the Clean air Act] could effectively ban important new large-scale construction in the future.
[The right-to-know law would be] harmful to the economy and not very helpful to the air.
The bill produces no protection for legitimate industry trade secrets, the disclosure of which would not be necessary to protect health or the environment.
[The right-to-know bill would be] a serious case of overkill….[and] would make it very difficult to maintain a business in the city of Philadelphia.
[The right-to-know law] would make it very difficult to maintain a business in the community.
We think the message here is that legislation that is punitive toward business and heedless of the impact on the economy of this City adds to the flight of business investment. The results of this are greater economic stagnation, fewer jobs, and deterioration in the public health and welfare.
We do not believe that merely furnishing a list of the ingredients of our products to the general public will enable the general public will enable the general public to intelligently decide which, if any, are liable to endanger the environment. What such a list can and will do, is enable our competitors to learn something about the nature of our products. With competition in the market place as it is today, we certainly do not need the City Council to help our out-of-town competitors.
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.
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.
