Costly Regulatory Farce of the Month

Somewhere in Vermont there is a small manufacturing company that employs 15 Vermonters. The plant obtains water for washing and flushing from its own well. The well does not serve any other users. Every three months the company has to submit water samples for tests for all sorts of contaminants.

For years the well has been tested and passed muster - until last month, when for the first time it was found to have a bacteria count above federal drinking water standards.

Company management reasoned as follows: The only use of the water for human consumption is for the drinking fountain and the coffee machine. The great bulk of the water is used for flushing toilets and mopping floors. Therefore, we can solve this problem by buying quality bottled water for employee use. Then we can quit worrying about the bacteria count of the wash water, and stop paying well over a thousand dollars a year for water testing, not to mention the hassle.

A happy solution? Of course not. We are dealing with the Government here.

The management presented this common sense solution to the relevant functionary from the State of Vermont. No way, that personage said. There was no record of approval of your proposed bottled water. (It turned out that the bottled water, distilled from maple syrup making, had the Vermont Seal of Quality from the state Department of Agriculture.)

But there was also a graver defect in the proposed solution. What if one of the employees decided to sneak a drink from the toilet?

As humorist Dave Barry often says, "I'm not making this up." The company's proposal was rejected because an employee might drink unpurified water from the toilet.

This case hasn't been settled yet, but it seems highly likely that the State will require the company to install a purification system for its wash water, and continue the expensive quarterly testing.

This kind of rigid, brain-dead bureaucratic thinking is not confined to Vermont by any means, but it is especially regrettable in a state with a well-deserved historic reputation for Yankee ingenuity, cost-saving, and common sense.

It is the nature of bureaucracy to go by the book and forbid any departures, however innovative and common sensical. Where the primary value is job security, perquisites and promotion, as opposed to taking chances to better serve the public, the choice for most bureaucrats is relatively easy.

Bend the rules and agree to a common sense solution, and you may have to answer for it with your job. Go by the book and your job is safe; what does it matter to you if it costs ordinary citizens thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars? No skin off your anatomy.

Thus we have bureaucrats ordering businesspeople to locate a gas station underground (later reversed); bureaucrats (in this case, Federal EPA) demanding a $30 million cleanup for a superfund site for the sole purpose of providing clean well water for eight families that are on the town water main; insisting that a power company build a canoe portage over somebody else's land; and extorting development rights from a landowner as the price of using his gravel pit. Sadly, this list could be prolonged indefinitely.

The further the bureaucracy is from the people it rules, the less responsive it is to their real world situations. Regulation close to home is more apt to accept flexible common sense solutions, at the risk of charges of favoritism. With good oversight and public information, the favoritism problem can be managed. What can not be effectively managed - save through top-down political pressure and outright corruption - is bureaucratic regulation from afar.

Isn't it time we started bringing control of necessary regulation closer to our communities, and getting rid of the unnecessary regulation that imposes needless costs, makes work for bureaucrats instead of producers, and has little or no public benefit?

July 1996