Bravo to incoming Gov. Paul LePage for the red-tape listening sessions his staff and legislators are conducting around the state.

The testimony so far has been informative and eye-opening.

LePage promised during the campaign that he would slash unnecessary and redundant government red tape and regulation.

The listening sessions are the first step in that process.

Tuesday in Farmington, land developer Darryl Brown of Livermore came armed with two stacks of documents, one about 2 inches thick and the other about 10 inches high.

One represented the work done on a project 30 years ago and the other, the fat one, on a similar project completed more recently.

The two stacks demonstrated, he said, how regulations have grown by leaps and bounds.

Perhaps it’s all necessary. Perhaps not.  In any event, it’s good to look at regulations from time to time to see if they can be streamlined or even eliminated.

Cameron Lorrain, manager of the Kingfield Poland Spring water bottling plant, said the facility took one year longer to build and cost $2 million more than similar plants built elsewhere in the U.S.

If that is true, and if it is typical of other types of industrial projects built in Maine, it is no wonder we are having a hard time attracting job-producing development.

Most at the hearing said they realized Maine must have rules and regulations. But they also agreed that we must determine which are absolutely necessary and how the process for approval can be streamlined and shortened.

There was a time when we talked about a “paperless society,” when everything could be completed quickly and electronically.

Instead, it seems our society is moving in the opposite direction and we seem more buried in paperwork than ever.

Anyone who purchased a home 30 years ago will recall that it was a simple process involving maybe a dozen pages of contracts. A prospective homeowner could actually sit down, read and understand what he or she was signing.

If you have purchased or refinanced a home recently, you know those days are long gone. You probably walked out of some lawyer’s office having applied your signature to a large stack of unintelligible legalese.

Surely, you probably thought, the bank has protected itself from every conceivable hazard, from carpenter ants to a meteor strike.

Yet, as we saw in the recent mortgage crisis, banks were apparently too busy drawing up legal documents to do the far more important basics, like checking to make sure borrowers actually had jobs and correctly stated their incomes.

The girth of paperwork — red tape, if you will — did little or nothing to protect some of the largest banks from imploding.

Think of the repetitive privacy notices you now receive, and which you probably discard without reading. Doctors, insurers, charge card companies, banks and investment firms are constantly filling our mailboxes with required notices and warnings, few of which actually make us feel any safer.

Perhaps this is the price we pay for living in a complex, advanced society — paperwork.

Still, we think Gov.-elect LePage’s effort to trim that burden is necessary and long overdue.

editorialboard@sunjournal.com

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