Letter About Regulation's Impact on the Poor to Congressman John Yarmuth

 

6/9/2010

Congressman John Yarmuth

435 Cannon House Office Building
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-5401   FAX 202-225-5776

re:  EPA’s RPP rule and governmental responsibility to inform the public

Dear Congressman Yarmuth,

      As a man who at least appears to be interested in the plight of the poor in this country I’d like to bring a recent EPA regulation to your attention.  Let me say first that I am no opponent of the EPA and consider myself to be an environmentalist and occasional activist.  I am also in favor of lead abatement but would like to express a worry I have about the RRP rule and government’s general attitude towards the poor.

      The new RRP rule contains maximum penalties per day of over $37,000 for non-compliance.  I don’t have the time to read the entire regulation and though I worked as a typist for a major law review while in college, reading legalese is not an easy or enjoyable task.  Imagine that task laid on the average painter.  You may have met one at some point, you know, didn’t graduate from high school, literally scraping by?  These rules require that a painting (or any other) contractor  go through an 8 hour certification course that, if I’m not mistaken, requires a bit of math to be able to work on any building built before 1978.  Has anyone at the EPA actually met a painter?  How do they expect that old black man down the street that paints houses with his brain damaged son and an ex-con that can’t get any other work to a) know anything about this new rule and b) to be able to afford the $250+ per worker and actually be able to pass certification? 

      Let me start with a.  Despite my education and experience I had no idea that starting 5/22/2010 I could be in legal and financial jeopardy if I painted a house built before 1978 until a chance statement from a real estate agent of one of my clients.  I found out by accident.  Does the government believe that ordinary people have legal advisors?  As an artist and musician contracting to be able to afford to make art and music my income is probably the same as the hypothetical painter above and I can’t even afford to get someone else to do my taxes, much less keep an attorney on retainer to inform me of changes to federal regulations that criminalize my livelihood.   I expect my government to inform me of minor details like this.  I’m a licensed contractor, you’d think my representative or city hall or someone could send me a postcard telling me that to continue to work on homes built before 1978 (I haven’t worked on anything newer than 1950 in years) I have to get certified for lead abatement or risk enormous fines.  Or how about at least requiring postings at places that sell paint and hardware?  Is it wrong to expect part of the job of government to be educating people that if they do the same thing they did last year they could be bankrupted?

      Now to b.  Passing certification will be no problem for me (though $250 out of my pocket always hurts) as I already know most of what I need to know and I have a bit of mathematics and test taking skill.[1]  But for many people that can barely get by, both the cost and the difficulty will be too great a hurdle to clear.  There is, as always, little or no consideration of the least amongst us when these decisions are made and the largest burden falls on their shoulders.  When you make $500/week for six months of the year painting houses, $250 is a huge amount of money.[2]  These EPA regulations have put an awful lot of poor, defenseless people in the position of being unwitting criminals.  Was there ever a thought of these people or how to help them deal with this?  I’m pretty sure there wasn’t.  For some reason when people envision “contractors” it’s some middle class man with thirty uniformed workers under him wearing a hard hat and driving a brand new truck when in fact the majority of us are doing this hard, dirty, underpaid work because there is nothing else they can do.  Most of these people are the kind of people we as a country continue to fail every single day.

      Perhaps I’ve been walking around in a haze since this bill passed in 2008 and just missed all the signs, e-mails, postcards, etc. that were put in my face and I just didn’t see them.  I wonder how many of the hundreds of thousands of small contractors in this country know nothing about this rule.  Perhaps you could have a member of your staff find out for me how much the EPA budgeted for enforcement of this rule as opposed to how much they budgeted for informing and aiding the contractors it affects. 

Sincerely,

Alan Miller

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[1] I am an artist and musician that does contracting to afford making art and music.  I have a B.A. from Tulane.

[2] But then again, allowing utility companies to add on flat fees is a disproportionate burden (like if the Louisville Water Co. were to add .25 per 1000 gallons to the cost of water they would probably get more money for repairing our water system but instead they hit everyone with an extra $56/mo so the million gallon a month manufacturing plant pays $56/mo towards this just like me that uses around 1000 gallons a year), just as flat fees for all governmental services is a disproportionate tax on the poor, etc. seems to be the way American government works these days.  And how American business works as well between the virtual use of slave labor for production outside the country to our usurous credit system for that matter. 

Government Fees - Tax or Theft?

There's this little thing that bothers me and I thought I'd air it out a bit today. Have you noticed that every time you go to do something with the government there are strange, overly large fees involved? Just two instances I've encountered today include a $2.00 fee to mail in your vehicle registration renewal (for "handling") and a whopping $2.50 charge per transaction at the DMV to use a debit card. Both of these things pissed me off for multiple reasons so I fired off a couple of letters. First is to the Jefferson County Kentucky Court Clerk over the registration renewal fee and the second is to the Kentucky Department of Motor Vehicles about the debit charge (my name has been changed to protect me):

9-20-2007

Alan Evil

Bobbie Holsclaw, Jefferson County Clerk
P.O. Box 33033
Louisville KY 40232-3033

Re: $2.00 “handling” fee for mail-in registration renewal.

Dear Mrs. Holsclaw,

I was wondering if you could explain to me the $2.00 handling fee for registration renewal by mail.

First it seems renewing by mail would be much more efficient on your end as it could not possibly take an employee longer to open an envelope and process the renewal than it would take an employee to scream out a number, wait for the customer, talk with them, etc. So that’s a savings, right? Adding to the improved efficiency is the fact that you do not need a large, air conditioned space with waiting rooms, banks of lights, etc. A big plus of this is, of course, that we, the citizens, need but write a check and fill out an envelope thereby allowing us to save the hour or more it takes to renew in person most of the time and use this in a productive way.

Second, unless you are sending a full plate, the postage for the renewed registration and sticker could not possibly exceed forty one cents, throw in an envelope purchased in bulk and you might make it up to fifty cents. Of course, if you mailed in bulk the cost would be less, probably around thirty cents.

So what is the $2 for? Is it just a way to add expense to a convenience to increase your department’s coffers? If the process is more efficient and requires less manpower then it should either cost the same as the less efficient method or it should be cheaper. Please explain to me how it is $2 more expensive per registration renewal by mail as opposed to in person.

Sincerely,
Alan Evil

9-20-2007

Alan Evil

Division of Driver Licensing
200 Mero Street
Frankfort, KY 40622

Re: $2.50 per transaction debit card fee

To Whom It May Concern:

I noticed today while replacing my stolen driver’s license that the downtown Louisville branch has begun to accept debit cards for payment. I applaud this… or at least I would if your weren’t charging $2.50 per transaction to use a debit card. Where does that $2.50 go and why is it necessary?

Not only is the debit card more convenient (and more commonly used) than cash or check, it makes the job of your clerks easier and less apt to error. I worked retail for over 12 years and know this to be a simple fact. Not only is it more efficient at the counter, it’s more efficient afterward as, without any filling out of deposit slips, counting of cash, manual adding of checks, etc. the money from customers’ accounts is deposited automatically for you at midnight. All you have to do is print a summary for your records.

Either you are skimming this money to fatten your department’s coffers rather than requesting more funding (and higher taxes) as you should, or whomever set the system up is robbing all of us blind.

Have you ever had a convenience store charge you anything at all for using a debit card? The only time I know of charges being added to debit cards is at ATM machines run by banks other than the cardholder’s. I have seen really small stores requiring $5 or $10 minimum to use debit or charge cards, but not in many years. Every little podunk store in the State takes debit cards without charging $2.50 for each use (for a $45 license renewal that’s over 5%!). This sounds like theft to me.

As a matter of a fact, I know individual people that have credit card readers attached to their cel phones so they can sell at art festivals and the like and they don’t charge their customers a penny for this convenience. You can’t get much smaller than one person selling stuff in a festival booth.

I am sure the DMV does enough business that you could find a company that would charge a pittance (less than a percent) for debit card use. So why are you using a company that would simply rob us? Could it be cronyism? Lack of oversight? Some obscure rule that says you have to milk every penny possible from those you serve? As always, this fee is much more a burden on the poor than the rich, but this seems to be the way government works these days. You’ll cut the taxes for an industrial plant and raise fees that will be a disproportionate percentage of income of the poor. You’ll allow overloaded coal trucks to destroy our roads and then bump up the average person’s fees for everything concerning driving.

Please convince me that there is a legitimate reason for this fee. In my opinion whoever set up your debit system should be fired and replaced with someone who at least is competent. If you were running a retail business and one of your employees set up a debit system that cost you $2.50 every time you ran a card, you would fire that person so quickly they wouldn’t even have time to gather up their children’s pictures off their desk. That’s how I feel about this and I’m one of the people paying your salaries.

Sincerely,
Alan Evil