Yesterday, Ohio Chamber of Commerce member Thomas E. Secor, President of Durable Corporation, hosted Lieutenant Governor Mary Taylor the Common Sense Initiative (CSI), and the Ohio Chamber to speak to local businesses about the role CSI can play in Ohio’s business community.

We’ve talked about CSI on Talking Policy before, but the valuable services CSI provides to Ohio businesses are worth repeating. In Norwalk, Taylor addressed thirty business owners and outlined the two main purposes of CSI. First, CSI exists to help businesses communicate issues with state agencies. For example, Taylor shared that Custom Culinary in northeast Ohio ran into a problem making their Italian marsala sauce due to outdated alcohol requirements for food manufactures. With the help of CSI, this issue was addressed and now businesses can purchase alcohol wholesale, rather than buy the retail bottle. Second, CSI reviews newly proposed rules by conducting a business impact analysis. This process ensures that lawmakers justify rules in that the rules make sense, do not overreach, and businesses can reasonably comply with them. In the first-ever rule review process in 2012, CSI saw 44% fewer rules proposed that negatively impact business.

A third aspect of CSI, pointed out by  Dan Navin, the Ohio Chamber’s Assistant Vice President of Tax and Economic Policy, is that CSI also performs a business impact analysis on rules that are up for a five-year review. This has been instrumental in systematically getting outdated, irrelevant, and unnecessarily burdensome rules off of the books to help employers do business easier. Since 2011, CSI has reviewed nearly 5,300 rules and 57% have been either fixed or removed after the business impact analysis.

As the Lieutenant Governor concluded, CSI is “about making a difference” in the way businesses work in Ohio, as well as making sure that Ohio remains a good place to start a business due to a responsive and business-friendly legislature and state agencies. We encourage our members to reach out to CSI and our team of experts whenever they run into these issues and can suggest solutions to problems to ensure the business community has a voice in the rulemaking and lawmaking processes.