Last month, Gov. Paul LePage put his own touch on the sign welcoming motorists into the state — in addition to declaring Maine “the way life should be,” it now proclaims the state’s “open for business.” As with his controversial removal of a labor union-themed mural at the Department of Labor, it’s part of LePage’s effort to be more accommodating to business interests, largely by reforming the state’s approach to regulation.
I spoke with Charles Colgan a professor at USM’s Muskie School for Public Service for his take on the ongoing campaign.
Gov. Paul LePage campaigned on the idea that the businesses community has been unfairly shut out of the regulatory process, and that much of it is hostile toward the business community. Do you agree with that assessment?
Maine has an extremely open government process. It’s a very small system. Augusta is a very small city, so it’s hard to imagine anybody being completely shut out to the point where they’re not being heard. Whether they’re really being listened to and responded to is another question. I think there are cases when government regulation has done things that the business community or specific businesses haven’t liked, but when government sets out to create regulations like that — health, safety or environmental — their job is not to please businesses; their job is to protect the environment or our health and safety. If they can do that in an expeditious or least-costly manner, that’s all to the good.
I do think Maine regulation tends to be overly dependant on standards and one-size-fits-all approaches, in many cases. There is more that’s we’ve learned about being flexible in terms of achieving those kinds of goals through economic incentives and other things. So there is room for improvement, definitely. But to say that the Department of Environmental Protection’s main job is to help businesses, that’s a misunderstanding of the purpose of that department.
Do you think any of the sweeping changes he’s proposed could lead to better regulations, as opposed to just fewer?
One of the things that he proposed in his LD1 [bill] was to add cost analysis to environmental regulations. I actually went and testified to the legislative panel that’s dealing with LD1 on that issue, and what I said was cost-benefit analysis is a very good way, when done properly, to help you understand what it is you’re trying to achieve and what the costs are. You can find more efficient ways of doing things, but it’s not free. It’s time consuming. You need to train people to do it right so it doesn’t become a war of experts. You also have to realize that in most cases when you do the analysis right, most of the regulations we put in are going to come up as cost-benefit justified. But I think the traditional idea is that if you apply cost-benefit analysis, you’d never do anything, but that’s not true. It’s not free, either.
It was just revealed that one of the bills introduced by a Republican legislator and endorsed by LePage was drafted by the chemical industry. Did that surprise you at all?
No, I wasn’t surprised.
So it’s not unusual?
Well, that’s the thing. Augusta is a small place, and there’s a lot of informal processing. I think in terms of legislation that people introduce, it’s not unusual at all for business groups to write the legislation that’s introduced. Whether it gets passed or not is another question.
I do think that turning the process of draft rule writing over to industry lobbyists is not good practice. That’s what you pay government staff to do, to write rules and hear comments on it. That’s a fundamental rule of government process. It doesn’t surprise me that industry groups are involved in legislation writing, that happens all the time, but there is a point that turning the regulation process over to obviously self-interested groups is inappropriate.
The governor has since said he regretted the timing of it, but his removal of the labor-oriented mural in the Department of Labor, along with renaming a lot of the rooms there, was a gesture aimed at making the building more welcoming to corporations. Do you see any merit in that?
No. It’s hard for me to imagine a business thinking of coming to Maine, seeing that mural and turning around and heading south.