Will The Small Business Committee Really Help?
When Bob Faulkner and daughter Christine visited City Hall in 2008, they wanted to know what zoning ordinances existed for the property they were hoping to purchase in South Kansas City. They were told that they could offer the same hay ride, petting zoo and pumpkin patch activities they currently did for corporate and educational clientele at their existing Benjamin Ranch business on leased property. Having only 48 hours to make a deal, the Faulkners went ahead and closed on a very large purchase. Only later did the two find out that it would take another $57,000 and a several-month-long approval process before the doors could finally open for business on their new Faulkner’s Ranch project. During the first visit to City Hall, no one had mentioned these minor details.
Such stories, related by shell shocked business people, is one of the purposes of meetings like the one I attended last Monday evening (October 17), put on by the new Special Committee on Small Business. These meetings are held at commercial venues around the Metro in order to make it easier for owners who find it difficult to get downtown, or simply have an understandable aversion to setting foot in City Hall. Committee members say they want to collect testimony in an effort to reduce obstacles to the growth of small business in the Metro Area.
According to committee members, the process for getting approval to open Faulkner’s Ranch doors would be less lengthy today than it was in 2008. This is because paperwork no longer needs to wait on one desk for signing before proceeding to another. Additionally, communication problems like those experienced by the Faulkners with City Hall are said to have been greatly reduced with the creation of Bizcare, a customer service center across from City Hall which opened in 2009.
Beyond such process improvements, and the periodic off-site small business meetings, the City has launched the website KC Momentum. It’s an implementation of a third-party collaborative web app called MindMixer, described by its creators as a “virtual town-hall.” The purpose of KC Momentum is to provide direct community input via a slick, easy to use, digital forum. Additionally, Scott Talyor described a yet-to-be-developed online automation system for getting businesses off the ground and maintaining permits, inspections, etc. He said that in the near future, it would likely be unnecessary for many small business owners to make a trip to City Hall to start or maintain their businesses.
How likely is it that the work of the Small Business Committee will make a real difference? The idea of making government efficient and free of hassles is ultimately a losing battle since there are no market forces to keep it moving in the right direction. Instead, it has only one ever-present incentive: take the path of least resistance and provide less value while increasing revenue via taxation. That’s leaving aside the out-and-out antagonism to small business displayed in many actions taken by the City Council: like the just-passed law requiring all taxi services to accept credit cards, amounting to a huge barrier-to-entry into the public transportation sector.
Short of the elimination of regulatory bureaucracy in KC altogether, this author suspects that online-based automation (like KC Momentum and the proposed future implementations) is a decent way to go—provided the software is any good. At least it could eliminate the need for entrepreneurs to have to interact with bureaucratic zombies who want to hassle them and send them on wild goose chases. Of course, good software can’t to be taken for granted: the same inherent problems that plague other government endeavors, make it inevitable that software government produces will likely suck too. But third-party web solutions like MindMixer, designed by entrepreneurs, will be far better than solutions cities might develop themselves.
In a real sense, turnkey solutions like MindMixer, represent a way the market is coming to its own aid in combating the natural inertia of government.
