March 20, 1998

THE EPA'S SMALL BIZ AGENDA: A TALK WITH TOM KELLY

Vice President Al Gore keeps swinging at the Internal Revenue Service, demanding the agency overhaul its commitment to customer service. That's welcome news to small-business owners, who have derided the IRS for what they claim is an unfair level of scrutiny. That same outrage persists for the Environmental Protection Agency, whose paperwork requirements have been likened to "slow torture." Might Gore's announcement also signal a customer service breakthrough at the EPA? On Feb. 18, Enterprise Online's Dennis Berman spoke to Tom Kelly, the EPA's small-business advocacy chair, about how the agency will approach small fry in the golden age of Gore -- where, at least as the Veep imagines it, government should "not just [be] taken off people's backs but put on their side."

Q: What do you make of the IRS proposals -- and can the EPA do something similar?

A: I don't see any interaction between the IRS situation and our own. But there have been a variety of reforms specific to EPA's programs that we've been working on for the past couple of years. One is reducing the paperwork burden, and we've removed 25 million to 28 million hours of paperwork. Still, we obviously have statutes that require us to write rules. And that means the overall paperwork burden is holding steady and actually rising just a bit.

Q: The EPA is a big part of the new "gripe panels" [run by the Small Business Administration and officially called the Regulatory Fairness Program. See Enterprise, Mar. 2, "Bullied by Big Brother? Now You've Got an Ally"]. What tangible results have come out of them?

A: We have completed five panels so far, and our sixth is under way... convening in the middle of April. And they've really become a part of our everyday life. There is still a tendency by any institution to think as it always has. So when you sit down with advisers drawn from the small-business community... you get a completely different dynamic when you consider the issues. I think the EPA now does a strong job of outreach and information gathering with small businesses relatively early in the rule-making process.

For example, we recently did a panel on industrial laundries [which clean clothes from potentially toxic workplaces such as auto repair shops and hospitals]. The proposed rule does contain fairly tight standards. And that, I will grant, made a lot of people upset. What I don't think they have noticed is that in the proposal there are 13 separate alternatives -- proposed, costed out, with environmental effects identified -- that would exclude different numbers of small laundries.

Q: Are you doing anything else you would consider "customer service"?

A: Take the industrial laundries example again. The agency is under court order to issue this regulation, and one of the options the agency presented for public comment was to ask people to show if there is any basis for not issuing the regulation. In the past, the agency would say "this is what they're going to do. This is the technology they'll put in place, and this is what it will cost them." Public comment was available, but that was just for nibbling around the edges. The agency has never before invited comment on the prospect of issuing no regulation.

That's an extraordinary occurrence -- and proof of the power of the panel to open the agency's thinking.

Q: The EPA is one of those institutions that's always "under reform." How are we to believe this time is any different?

A: The EPA does not just sit back and dream about how to regulate people. It is almost always operating under the specific direction of a statute. We're continuing to operate under the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, and the Safe Drinking Water Act amendments of 1995.

Paperwork sometimes works. We just issued a rule on PCB management which is going to save a couple hundred million a year for business on how they manage PCBs. In order to change their physical requirement, they've got to keep records and show what they've got. There's a bit of replacement function -- taking away the burden that's in our power to eliminate or reduce, but at same time we're required to use information to support the rule-making.

Q: Senate Small Business Committee Chair Kit Bond (R-Mo.) says he thinks the regulatory fairness panels aren't doing enough to help aggrieved taxpayers.

A: I think he's completely wrong. We believe that sensitive and fair treatment of small business is good environmental policy. We think that managing that policy as well as our formal responsibilities is among the most important things we do.

Q: How important will it be for companies to use electronic record-keeping in years ahead?

A: We see lots of advantages. No. 1, it's much more efficient for the business, which is able to use the same database to issue several reports. Because of that utility to the firm, we believe that the information [the EPA collects electronically] will be more stable and accurate. No. 3, it ought to make the information more accessible to people who want to use it. We've been working on EDI [Electronic Data Interchange] for a few years. That will allow information to be transferred form "Any Computer USA" to the mainframe.

Have a complaint for the EPA? Call Ombudsman Karen V. Brown at 1-800-368-5888.