
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 23, 1994                   TAG: 9411160033
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

UNTANGLING THE RED TAPE

IN HIS boffo comic performance on Dave Letterman's ``Late Show'' last year, Vice President Al Gore cited 10 pages of regulations that govern the federal government's purchasing of ashtrays. The example underscored the Clinton administration's determination to liberate Washington of some of the red tape entangling it.

Is Virginia's government also hog-tied with unnecessary regulations? Certainly not to anything like the same extent as the swollen federal bureaucracy. But legislators, businesses and citizens in the commonwealth have long complained that they run up too often against regulatory walls of paperwork and arcane rules when dealing with state agencies. The result is to delay government's response to needs and concerns, if it doesn't stop the response altogether.

Indeed, as Del. George Grayson, D-Williamsburg, has pointed out, a state law written with five sentences may generate 27 pages of new agency regulations which choke the agency's ability to serve its clients efficiently.

Little noticed among parole reform and other flashier initiatives, Gov. George Allen has signed executive orders that could do in Virginia some of what Clinton and Gore are trying to do with their reinventing-government schemes.

Unlike Clinton and Gore, whose reinvention efforts are directed primarily at increasing the efficiency and quality of government services (while saving money in the process), Allen seems mostly concerned with the effects of overregulation on businesses.

This concern is not to be sniffed at. Excessive regulations stifle private enterprise unnecessarily. And, in many cases, the same or improved result can be achieved by means other than cumbersome command-and-control regulations. More market-based incentives, for example, should be tried.

Allen needs to be reminded that the public interest must come first, of course. Sometimes regulations that businesses don't like are warranted by government's role in protecting the general welfare.

But the governor is on target in ordering a sweeping review of all state agencies' existing regulations, plus putting in place a framework to review regulations proposed in the future, with an eye toward assuring the following:

1. They are necessary to meet a specific purpose. 2. If already on the books, they are meeting their specific purpose. 3. They aren't duplicative of other agencies' regulations. 4. They aren't obsolete. 5. They do not impose unnecessary government restraint, costs or interference on the lives of private citizens or businesses when less intrusive means are available to accomplish the same goal. 6. They make sense; i.e., they are clearly written and can be easily understood by those affected, regulators and regulated alike.

All will be lost if Allen's regulatory overhaul is pursued with a hidden, ideological agenda that is masked by neutral rhetoric about reform and efficiency but is really aimed at gutting good goals and offering unwarranted breaks to special interests. This could happen. If it does, it would be lamentable not only in its own right, but because it would lend a bad odor and ugly purpose to what should be a good and needed endeavor: untangling the webs of bureaucracy.

The effort to reduce red tape is, in any case, another example of Allen's following through on promises he made in his '93 campaign. That's a good thing, whatever else one might think of the governor and his agenda.

by CNB