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.
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.
[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?
[T]he expansion of government’s role in the marketplace has, in many cases, impaired the performance of our economy…That the trend toward accelerating inflation has been aggravated by the expansion of government expenditure programs…and by regulatory policies that reduce productivity.
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.
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. We’re dealing with an enormously technical matter that the public doesn’t understand at all, that I don’t understand at all.
The moment you get either people or lawyers apprised of the fact that a company has a toxic material on their premises, they’re going to bring a lawsuit.
