It was a day that offered up the full range of emotional reaction to that time-honored staple of business, dealing with an intrusive federal government. You want white-hot fury over alleged fed vendettas? It was there. Brave attempts at humor as a coping mechanism? Yep. Pathos intended to test the limits of your tear ducts’ endurance? Plenty of that, too.
The venue was a little cool: a beige-green auditorium at KeyCorp headquarters. But the emotions quickly grew as overheated as a midday trek across the Sahara in a rubber suit.
The occasion, held Aug. 10, was a regulatory fairness board hearing in which a few dozen small-businesspeople came from Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky to tell their tales of woe to a panel of small businesspeople designated by Congress to look into their complaints. As they travel around the country, these fairness boards-established under the 1996 Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act to monitor federal agency enforcement activities as they relate to small businesses-have had a handful of successes in winning relief for aggrieved individual business owners. But their overall goal is far loftier.
“We want to change the structure of these federal agencies” as they relate to small business, the national ombudsman, Peter Barca, said grandly of the process, which in some ways is the successor of the White House Conferences on Small Business.
Some of the testimony, unfortunately, failed to live up to such lofty standards. For instance, a pool-maintenance contractor from Canton complained about unfair fines from the Environmental Protection Agency. Conceding that he had received pages of regulations from the agency, he said, “I don’t have time to read all that, and if I did, I wouldn’t understand it.” Had he ever thought to hire a lawyer or a specialist to help?
Others tried humor. Jim Steckel, a third-generation pest-control man from Columbus, drew admirers with his engaging, homespun style-“small bidness,” he called it. As he came upon a passage in his remarks mentioning the “EPA’s methodology,” he stopped, looked up and grinned. “It’s probably mythology,” he said, prompting laughter even from the stern chairperson, the owner of a marketing business in Chicago.
Akron’s Russell Vernon took a different tack-blistering indignation. The bow-tied owner of West Point Market used the hearing as his latest opportunity to publicly protest what he considers the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s 30-month vendetta against his company for his alleged failure to hire a representative proportion of minority employees. “We were caught in the ultimate bureaucratic gotcha” by an arrogant agency that’s really a “government within a government,” he said, his concentrated fury momentarily lowering the room temperature.
But a former business owner from Cincinnati probably came away with the prize for the most harrowing tale. He told his side of a 10-year battle with the Labor Department’s Wage and Hours Division over what he called technical violations of his flextime policy. Because of an original $3,100 discrepancy (out of a $1.5 million payroll), he charged, he had been forced out of business, his personal credit ruined, and his family now reduced to living in an unfinished basement of his mother’s home. As he sat down to stunned silence after delivering the fusillade, SBA regional director Gil Goldberg turned to an acquaintance and gravely shook his head: “Sounds awful,” he said.
By 6 p.m., five hours after the hearing had convened, the entire board and a half-dozen spectators were still on hand. An owner of a telecommunications company complained of the sneaky practice of third-party “slamming”-tricking telephone customers into “authorizing” a change in their long-distance provider-which the FCC has thus far been unable to stamp out. Nobody was looking at their watches, but instead used his presentation as a springboard to get some free consulting from him about their own phone-service problems.
We took that as our signal to scram.