Column | Lewis: The great Colorado fork crisis
Mark Lewis Follow
While I was distracted by housing costs, insurance premiums, traffic, energy prices, and businesses leaving Colorado, our elected officials were hard at work confronting the real threat: unsolicited plastic utensils.
Colorado recently passed legislation requiring restaurants to provide forks, spoons, knives, napkins, straws, and condiment packets only when specifically requested. Fortunately, the Governor vetoed the bill. On the surface, this bill seems harmless enough. If fewer plastic forks end up in the landfill, that’s a good thing. But I couldn’t stop wondering about something else. How much did the fork bill itself cost? Not the forks. The bill.
Someone had to draft the legislation. Staff had to research it. Lawyers had to review it. Committees had to hear testimony. Lobbyists had to attend meetings. Legislative aides had to prepare briefing materials. Agencies had to determine how it would be implemented. Businesses had to read it. Managers had to train employees. Point-of-sale systems might need updates.
So, let’s say that at a minimum, it cost $250,000 to process this bill. Those cheap plastic forks cost about $0.01, so that means we need to take 25,000,000 forks out of the landfill just to break even. But wait, what about the added time and process costs to comply? Unfortunately, the hidden regulatory cost burden never goes away or breaks even.
At some point a restaurant owner must explain to a 17-year-old employee: “Okay, if someone orders tacos, ask whether they would like a fork. Unless they already requested a fork. Or unless the delivery app requested a fork. Or unless they requested utensils, which includes forks but may also include knives, spoons, napkins, straws, and condiment packets. Any questions?”
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The employee quits and becomes a rocket scientist because it’s less complicated. Meanwhile, somewhere in Colorado, a state employee is theoretically responsible for enforcement. Imagine that job.
“Good afternoon, sir. I’m with the Colorado Department of Fork Compliance.”
“What seems to be the problem?”
“We have received a report that you provided an unsolicited plastic spoon.”
The obvious response is that enforcement will never happen. Which raises a question. If nobody intends to enforce it, why did we spend all the time writing it? The modern regulatory state rarely dies from one giant regulation. It dies from a thousand tiny ones.
Each new regulation sounds reasonable. Each has a worthy objective. Each requires only a few hours of meetings, a few pages of rules, a little compliance, a little paperwork, a little training. The cumulative effect is an entire ecosystem of people spending time managing things that previously required no management at all.
The fork is not the issue. The issue is that Colorado increasingly behaves like a state with no shortage of important problems and an endless supply of time to solve unimportant ones. I suspect most Coloradans don’t care whether their burrito arrives with a plastic fork.
They do care whether their government knows the difference between a nuisance and a priority. And if we’re going to regulate forks, perhaps the next logical step is a statewide task force to determine the optimal number of ketchup packets.
This bill is the perfect example of how we are also failing to understand the linkage between regulation and affordability. Just like thousands before it, these bills have one thing in common: they raise costs for Coloradans. In the last 20 years, Colorado has plummeted from middle of the pack to the 4th least affordable state in the nation. National policies didn’t do this – our state government did. How? In a word: over-regulation.
Fortunately, Governor Polis vetoed the fork bill. Hopefully, because he also recognizes the cost of over-regulation. While there are millions and millions of things that we might like to control, we need to understand that every new law or regulation increases costs – period.
It’s pretty simple. If we want to make Colorado affordable again, we need to reverse course and actively work to reduce the regulatory burden.
