Profile in Business: Sean Cota: Doing it the Old Yankee Way

Vermont Business Magazine, Feb 01, 2003 by Marcel, Joyce

Small Business State

Vermont is a small-business state. The median business has 3.75 employees, Cota said, and the average, including IBM, the University of Vermont and the state itself, is six employees. Frustrated with what he believes is a lack of common sense at the state level, Cota wants Vermont to adapt its thinking to the right scale.

"The state has lost the Vermont perspective," Cota said. "They need a litmus test for any new regulation or administrative procedure. If they're going to have a regulation or tax program that's so cumbersome that it's going to be difficult for a small business to implement, it doesn't make sense for Vermont."

Cota found a perfect example of this problem when Obuchowski appointed him to the Small Business Hazardous Waste Compliance Board at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.

"They had an ombudsman for small business," Cota said. "I asked how it worked, and he said, 'People call in and I try to point them to the various departments that pertain to them, because the rules are complex and I don't have a grasp of it all.' And I said, 'Don't you understand the conflict of what you just said? Your only job is to assist small business in hazardous waste, hazardous material regulation and implementing the rules. You have a staff of, think, 300 people in the agency who are going to work with you to provide that information. Yet you're saying it's too complex for you to understand? Small business has to understand it all in order to implement it. So maybe your regulations need to be tailored differently.' And now I'm on the National Ombudsman Committee for the Environmental Protection Agency."

Cota also finds himself frustrated with the way federal child labor laws are implemented in Vermont.

"You can't hire anyone to do real work," he said. "For example, if you're under 14, you can't work with hazardous material, you can't work with power equipment, you can't be on any ladders. That's unless you're in an apprenticeship program. And that apprenticeship program has to be affiliated with a school, in order to review that the employer isn't taking advantage and the operations are safe."

Summer and vacation times are the main opportunities for young people to work, but schools are not in session then and no apprenticeship programs are running.

"It's a Catch-22 where nothing actually happens," Cota said. "The kids who need the experience the most, the kids with the lowest incomes who don't have the opportunities of a family business, who have really have limited opportunities, can't work. Bellows Falls is an at-risk community; there's federal money available to pay the kids. All you need is an apprenticeship program. I say that with this criteria, Tom Sawyer couldn't whitewash Aunt Polly's fence without being in violation of Vermont's labor laws."

In terms of environmental regulations, Cota does not see Act 250 as a problem.

"In some environmental regulations, New Hampshire is more strenuous than Vermont," he said. "But they're more expedient in how they do it, and they do it with less staffing and in a more businesslike manner. Also, they don't have any taxes in New Hampshire, but they have fees, and everything is fee'd to death."