It is really interesting to watch the dichotomy in responses to regulatory involvement here... One group...lets call them "the democrats" are convinced that all regulatory personnel are noble, hard working Erin Brokovich types out to save us all from the evil polluters whose only goal is to poison our children.
The other group...lets call them "the republicans" are convinced that all regulatory personnel are bumbling bureaucrats on a tyrannical power trip whose only goal is to shut down legal commerce and halt any and all economic activity because the businesses failed to address their permit fee letters to the proper administrative mail code.
Can we all just agree that there is a middle ground there? Do some regulators get buried in the weeds of small unimportant details and use them to extract fines from businesses that are otherwise trying very hard to comply with the rules? Yes. Are there businesses out there that ignore the laws that are inconvenient or costly for them and skirt the very edge of the "grandfathering" clauses of many regulations to scrape by with old and outdated control equipment just to avoid falling under a new regulatory requirement? Yes.
This image of the business owner out there mopping up every drop of spilled product with a q-tip "because it is expensive" and "you can't sell it on the ground" is just silly. That isn't what happens and everybody knows it. Nobody wants to have big expensive releases and they will go to great lengths to avoid them; but in certain industries and settings, small "de minimis" releases of a few gallons per month are considered just part of the business and nobody goes out of their way to avoid them or fix them until they all add up to a contaminated groundwater plume reaching somebody's well.
The other group...lets call them "the republicans" are convinced that all regulatory personnel are bumbling bureaucrats on a tyrannical power trip whose only goal is to shut down legal commerce and halt any and all economic activity because the businesses failed to address their permit fee letters to the proper administrative mail code.
Can we all just agree that there is a middle ground there? Do some regulators get buried in the weeds of small unimportant details and use them to extract fines from businesses that are otherwise trying very hard to comply with the rules? Yes. Are there businesses out there that ignore the laws that are inconvenient or costly for them and skirt the very edge of the "grandfathering" clauses of many regulations to scrape by with old and outdated control equipment just to avoid falling under a new regulatory requirement? Yes.
This image of the business owner out there mopping up every drop of spilled product with a q-tip "because it is expensive" and "you can't sell it on the ground" is just silly. That isn't what happens and everybody knows it. Nobody wants to have big expensive releases and they will go to great lengths to avoid them; but in certain industries and settings, small "de minimis" releases of a few gallons per month are considered just part of the business and nobody goes out of their way to avoid them or fix them until they all add up to a contaminated groundwater plume reaching somebody's well.
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