Government mandates for business have been in the news, especially President Clinton’s call for all employers to buy health insurance for their employees.
This is important stuff.
Big companies that already provide insurance wouldn’t be affected that much, but the mandate could force thousands of smaller outfits to lay off workers or go out of business. Experts predict 3 million jobs could be lost.
That’s bad, but at least the pain would be spread evenly across the nation. Every place has its vulnerable ma-and-pa stores, landscaping contractors and fast-food joints.
But there’s another, lesser known federal mandate on the horizon that also threatens jobs but whose impact will not be evenly distributed. This one will apply only to businesses in certain large metropolitan areas, including the Chicago region.
It’s “will” rather than “would,” because Congress already has approved this other mandate. What’s more, many companies that wouldn’t flinch about buying health insurance are going to go nuts trying to comply with this other requirement. Instead, many will downsize, disband or dash away to someplace where the rule doesn’t apply.
And yet, not many employers are aware of this other mandate. It’s a sleeper, in the sense that any discussion of it causes heaviness of the eyelids, which is why I haven’t mentioned its name yet. But here goes:
This column concerns the 1990 amendments to the federal Clean Air Act.
Still there? Turn the page if you must, but the public had better come to grips with this one while there’s still time.
Buried in the act’s 500 pages is a requirement that “ozone non-compliance” areas such as the Chicago area cut in half their vehicular pollution, mainly by increasing the average number of people riding in cars. If that goal isn’t met by the year 2007, Illinois would lose its federal transportation money-an unthinkable $700 million-a-year hit. Last summer the Illinois legislature approved a compliance plan that would raise the region’s average vehicle occupancy from today’s 1.1 riders to 1.36, about a 25 percent improvement.
To achieve that, most of the 5,400 large employers in the region will have to start car and van pools, shuttle-bus services or whatever it takes to reduce the number of cars in their lots. For companies in distant suburbs, far from public transit, this will mean significant personal and financial sacrifice.
One can argue that higher gas taxes would have been a better way to achieve the same ends, but that’s another matter.
The scary thing now is that federal officials have notified Illinois that we aren’t trying hard enough. They want what amounts to a 50 percent increase in vehicle occupancy, or about 1.7 people per car.
This has prompted some very knowledgeable local business people to throw up their hands in disbelief.
“There’s no way,” said Gregory Mutz, chairman of Amli Realty, a developer of suburban industrial parks. “If they try to enforce 1.7 you’ll see something close to regional shutdown.”
Mutz spoke last week at a seminar sponsored by the law firm Sidley & Austin. So did I, and my contribution was to recall that the federal government, historically, has backed down on threats to withhold funds when push came to shove. The feds caved in, for instance, when Oak Brook refused to come up with an open housing plan and when local hospitals refused to cancel expansion plans. Powerful people got on the phone. Rules were changed.
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But who am I to say that Congress will come to its senses on this one? Or that Valdas Adamkus, the federal environmental czar hereabouts, would never put thousands of people out of work in order to hit his “1.7” target?
It’s ironic that the federal government helped create the suburban sprawl that is at the root of our ozone problem . . . and many others. Cheap gas. Interstate highways. Federal mortgage insurance and tax deductibility. Lax protection of farmland, wetlands and flood plains.
State government, meanwhile, still touts “corridors of growth” such as the one shooting west along the East-West Tollway beyond Aurora. It actually paid Sears to move to Hoffman Estates; and last summer the legislature authorized three more tollways to ex-urban burgs such as Peotone and Richmond.
Now we’re going to clean up the mess with a big federal car-pooling mandate.
Yeah. Sure we are.