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Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Ind. Gov't. - "Unforeseen obstacles in the mix for startup doughnut factory"
Ruth Holliday's blog entry today reminded me that I'd intended to post about this lengthy story from the Sunday Star (Jan. 16th) reported by Jeff Swiatek. (BTW, I agree with Ruthie, it is nearly impossibly to read a Star story more than one-page long online. Why do they even bother to "post" it?) Some quotes:
[Mike] Ferrell, 45, knew it wasn't going to be easy getting a wholesale bakery up and running from scratch. One thing he didn't bank on was the long path of government approvals he'd have to slog down. It slowed his startup by six to eight weeks, he estimates.The culprits are right there on his desk as he speaks: three precious cardboard building permits that he finally extracted from government regulators.
"When you're a small businessman like us, and never gone through it," he says, "it's a daunting task. It was brutal.
"Nobody was mean to us or bad. They were real helpful. But the layers, you just get bogged down," says Ferrell, a former Krispy Kreme corporate manager who's trying to realize his dream of going it alone.
Consider a few examples of what happened when red tape met the doughnut-making business:
» City zoning staff wanted Ferrell to plant 26 trees around his property on South Kitley Avenue, though it's surrounded by industrial properties and hardly in a parklike setting. (To get a feel for the neighborhood, consider that an eight-foot metal fence topped with barbed wire lines the other side of the street.) Ferrell's attorney, whom he hired for the zoning process, managed to lower the requirement to just six trees on the front lawn. Even at that, Ferrell looks out his front widows and wonders where he'll plant six shade trees in a lawn underlain with utility lines and water monitoring wells.
» Virginia Kay's has just one employee, Ferrell's nephew Nick, but building codes required a bathroom up to the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act, including an extra-wide doorway and grab bars. Ferrell calls the $4,000 cost of the over-designed bathroom "ridiculous."
» A building inspector required Ferrell to install a water fountain on the premises. "When I said, 'What's wrong with bringing water in every day?' they said, 'What if you forget to order it?' "
» And the one that really gnaws at Ferrell: a "decontamination shower" next to the doughnut line, at a cost of $2,000. "In case you get sprayed with jelly, I guess," Ferrell says.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 19, 2011 01:18 PM
Posted to Indiana Government