4 days ago
Healey, moving to cut red rape and burnish business-friendly chops, unveils dozens of regulatory changes
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'What's most important is the mindset, [the] message that we heard,' said Jim Rooney, president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. 'This administration has that mindset of trying to deal with issues that are burdensome for people in businesses.'
The various regulatory amendments followed a
Her administration ultimately reviewed 150 sets of regulations. Healey said her administration is ultimately 'cutting down' 38 of them, many of which may appear minor, if not esoteric, to most consumers.
One would
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Grocery stores and supermarkets would no longer
have to make parts of so-called
Healey said the Division of Insurance would also no longer require banks and insurance companies to submit paper copies of filings in many instances.
'We'll save some trees in the process,' Healey said as she fed a prop piece of paper into the whirring shredder. 'It's about making sure that we have the right regulations [and] smart regulations.'
Healey isn't the first governor to boast of slashing red tape for businesses. Governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat, boasted in his final year in office in 2014 having led a review of nearly 1,800 regulations, and
Months after taking office in 2015, his successor, Charlie Baker ordered a wide-scale review of 'onerous' regulations. The move immediately
Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said many of Patrick and Baker's efforts ultimately had 'little or nothing to show' for it.
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He said his own members had raised to their administrations concerns about the unit pricing rules or the state's so-called hoisting regulations — think forklifts, Hurst said — without ever seeing action on them. Healey on Wednesday offered changes to the latter, including removing the requirement that hoisting engineering applicants communicate in English.
Those moves are encouraging, Hurst said, even if 'these were the easy ones, right?'
'The hard ones are yet to come,' he said, pointing to the potential for tackling escalating health insurance costs for businesses — a shift that could require legislation, is often complicated, and usually 'politically fraught.'
'We're just kind of just hitting the surface at this point,' he said.
Healey called Wednesday's announcement a 'first set of cuts and reforms,' though she did not indicate where or what rules her administration would review next.
Healey's first term, and her bid next year to remain in office, will likely hinge in part on whether she's met her repeated promise to shed Massachusetts' tax-heavy label and
She ran on realizing, and signed, a
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Both Republicans who've announced challenges to Healey — former MBTA executive
'Massachusetts [is] bleeding businesses, private sector jobs and workers,' Holly Robichaud, a Shortsleeve adviser, said in a statement Wednesday.
Matt Stout can be reached at
