Reducing Bureaucratic Obstacles

Governments have more power to hurt businesses than any other entity, so often times hurting businesses less, by making their system less burdensome, is the most important thing they can do to help the economies grow. Governmental burdens are especially damaging to plans which call for increasing small businesses. This is because while big businesses hire less employees because of regulations, they can usually deal with them. However, many small businesses are ready to start, or better yet expand, to hire more people “but they're stymied by permitting, inspections, fees, tax errors, and other challenges.” Regulations are often “outdated or poorly written or arbitrarily enforced,” and many are just arbitrary and meaningless all together as they don't directly address the concern they're meant to. Some city regulations even prevent such things as rooftop solar energy and greywater recycling; or prevent home businesses because they are so old they don't realize that a web designer can work from home while helping traffic by not commuting to work elsewhere (Brodwin, 2012). One regulation I've seen stymy small businesses was the requirement that all LLC's and other corporations (which include any restaurant with an owner who knows what they’re doing) in Philadelphia hire a lawyer to go with them to community meetings. This law cost many restaurant owners thousands of dollars they could have used for expansion, even though I never saw these lawyers speak at any of meetings I attended, because community members wanted to hear from the restaurant owner, not some freelance lawyer. I also saw an entrepreneur go to the city to find out what kinds of signs they were allowed based on their zoning, but no one could figure this out so they spent days wrangling with bureaucracy, because no one at the city understood its own codes. In other cases the “health department inspector tells the business owner to put the sink in one location; the building department wants the sink moved somewhere else.” It seems that different city agencies demand the business owner to do something different from the other and threaten to fine them if they don't comply (Brodwin, 2012).

Philadelphia's Sustainable Business Network has come up with nine important points for supporting small businesses and while many of these ideas are unique to large cities with inner city problems I still feel they are important to review to get a sense of what cities need to do to improve their business environment. This list includes; a reduction of “the time, cost and confusion of obtaining approvals,” the simplification of tax codes, the ensuring that laws don't
“unnecessarily harm small businesses,” a reformation of business inspections so that these are fair, objective, and offer the right to a timely appeal, and the improvement of the process by which the government and small businesses communicate with each other. So this list doesn't even necessarily call for a decrease in regulations, instead it calls for better methods for determining the value of regulations vs. the cost, as well as a lower costs in time and money to comply with regulations.

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