Philadelphia Worker and Community Right-to-Know Act Quotes

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.

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Thacher Longstreth, president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce

[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.

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President of the W.N. Stevenson Company and representative of the Northeastern Chemical Distributors Council.

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.

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Robert Vogel, chief regulatory counsel of the Rohm and Haas Company.

[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.

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Anthony F. Visco, Senior Vice President of the Northeast Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce

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.

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Thacher Longstreth president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and former Republican city councilman.

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.

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Thacher Longstreth president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and former Republican city councilman.

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.

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Thacher Longstreth president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and former Republican city councilman.

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.

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Thacher Longstreth, president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and former Republican city councilman

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.

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Thacher Longstreth, president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and former Republican city councilman

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.

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Thacher Longstreth, president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and former Republican city councilman

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