Smith protects interests of small businesses across state
8:18 PM 1/10/04
James Mills For the State Journal

If you're the owner of a small business, you have a friend in Bill G. Smith, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business. <

With offices just east of the Capitol on Doty Street, this nonprofit advocacy group gives an effective legislative voice to more than 13,000 independent business professionals across Wisconsin and 600,000 others throughout the United States. <

Among the group's major efforts in recent months has been work on SB-100, the Small Business Regulatory Fairness Act. The proposal mandates that state agencies assist small businesses in complying with regulations that may be obscure, prohibitively expensive or difficult to achieve. <

The bill is just one of the many state and national issues the NFIB tackles on behalf of its members. A concerted effort is under way to help small businesses get affordable health care. <

As state director, Smith has worked for 25 years to protect the interests of independent businesses including restaurateurs, retailers, manufacturers, sales representatives and others. <

WSJ: Of all the issues that your organization deals with, how would you rank them in terms of importance to your members? <

Smith: Well I think it's health care, taxes/spending, and regulation. I hate to put them in a priority order, because they are all very important. <

But some impact others. If you look at the health-care industry, it's heavily regulated. All the way to the insurance carriers to the insurance agent, and a lot of our members are insurance agents. They're heavily regulated. <

Regulation includes paperwork. (If) we can reduce regulation, and make regulation simpler, we might be able to reduce and make our paperwork a little simpler. You know the forms they fill out. So that's all part of this regulatory structure. <

Someone called regulatory cost the hidden tax, because small business has to pay it, big business has to pay it and it finds its way back into the system of course in the prices we pay for goods and services. <

WSJ: What's the most important legislative issue you are working on now? <

Smith: SB-100 has been taking a lot of time. This is the product of a 2002 task force on small business regulatory reform. We were working on this long before the big business reform bill, the Job Creation Act, got underway. <

This small business bill addresses real concerns on Main Street, because it was actually developed by small business owners who were members of the task force. <

WSJ: What would the bill do? <

Smith: It gives credibility to the 1983 Regulatory Flexibility Act, a state law passed under Gov. Anthony Earl. Ironically, that bill was also introduced during a special session on economic development. Here we are, 20 years later and still working on regulatory improvements. <

(The bill) will assist agencies so that they can comply with that act. <

For example, it sets up a coordinator in each state agency. And it sets up a review board of both agency people and small business people to take a look at rules that affect small business. The idea is to get small businesses working with the agencies, so that you have better compliance, with less enforcement costs. <

.