Lobbying for the little guy | Maine's first small business advocate hits the road
Photo/Amber Waterman
Jay Martin, Maine's small business advocate
Jay Martin, the state’s first small business advocate, likens regulatory challenges to potholes that business owners are forced to drive over or try and avoid. What they need is someone to identify those “regulatory trouble spots and recommend the Legislature and the governor get out there with the DOT truck and fill that pothole as soon as possible,” he says.
Martin — a 16-year veteran of restaurant management who formerly ran his own consulting business and helped Bangor-based Coffee News expand across the country — fills a position in the secretary of state’s office created this year with the passage of regulatory reform law LD 1. Besides working with businesses with 50 or fewer employees to help them address regulatory grievances, Martin will also work with the new Regulatory Fairness Board and testify to the Legislature on bills’ potential impacts on small businesses.
He recently sat down with Mainebiz to talk about what he’s heard from business owners since taking the job in early October. An edited transcript follows.
Mainebiz: What does this position entail?
Jay Martin: My role is specifically to advocate for small businesses that have a particular grievance or a complaint with a regulatory finding or regulatory directive ...These are serious circumstances here, where the future of a business is on the line, the future of their ability to maintain their employees ... So my job is going to be kind of an investigator, to do the fact finding with these businesses.Then I’ll be working with folks throughout Augusta to understand the pertinent regulations. I am within the secretary of state’s office; we’re independent of the executive [branch] — I can go to these folks without having to consider the way Augusta works necessarily in terms of political considerations.
Have you already heard from businesses needing help?
I would say we’ve had 15 to 20 contacts within the first month, and I would say the majority of those are folks who do seem to be falling within our scope.
So far is there a common theme in what business owners find challenging?
There certainly is. It seems that environmental protection laws are a common issue, and that’s understandable. There are a lot of them, they’re complex, [it’s] challenging to meet all those requirements, and whenever you’re trying to do something, it seems you run into an environmental protection law. The other issues we’re hearing about are the classic, “My code enforcement officer said it was OK, but the state fire marshal said it wasn’t OK.” Small businesses are very good at doing what they know how to do. They aren’t maybe experienced or understanding enough, or don’t have the resources to understand all the layers between town, state and federal [government around] compliance, and it’s especially challenging of course when those layers don’t exactly line up.
Is the current economic climate leaving business owners feeling more frustrated with regulations?
My sense is that there’s a sense of optimism growing as a result of this effort now, of instead of legislators coming and adding more laws, adding more regulations, they’re going to look hard at saying, “What laws are effective, what rules and regulations are working effectively? And if they are effective, let’s make sure they’re rock-solid strong and that people understand how to comply with them. And if they’re not, maybe we ought to look at saying it’s time to take them off the books.”
How is your job different from what's being done by other state agencies like the Department of Economic and Community Development?
My job really is to advocate for small businesses within state government, and by advocate that means I'm going to be working on behalf of these small businesses, and not necessarily just making the connection with state agencies. Quite frankly, that is more along the role of the Department of Economic and Community Development. They have a lot of folks there who are working very hard to make sure they have this business-answers program when people have questions about licenses and permits and regulations. They're setting up as part of LD 1, this is part of their mandate, a one-stop shop for all things pertaining to business regulations, permits, all the rest.
And they've done a pretty good job with what they had already. If you go to the business answers website, you can get some pretty good information. If you want to open a restaurant, it'll ask you, how many seats, are you going to have entertainment, and then boom, the end of that, OK, here are the permits and licenses you need, here's all the contact information, and you're off and running. Now you have a checklist of what you need to do. That's not my role. That would be more of a liaison role.
Now of course we're getting calls from folks with questions, concerns, complaints that fall outside our scope. What do we do when that happens? Well, let's still try to serve these folks. So we're working in cooperation with the Department of Economic and Community Development to understand when we have a call like this, we'd like to refer them to you. Likewise the DECD is getting calls, red-tape hotline type calls, "I got a real problem with this ABC, you know, this alphabet agency, they're giving me a really hard time, what do I do?" They can refer them over to me.
We had a meeting this week and talked about that kind of collaboration and cooperation and how we can make sure there's no duplication of services, but what overlap does exist in terms of the way their mission is structured and my mission is structured is overlap that is woven together, and not one stepping on the other.
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