WASHINGTON – Steven DiMillo says he has no problem with federal regulations that require his Portland restaurant’s 150 employees to fill out forms verifying their eligibility to work legally in the U.S.

What the manager of the popular DiMillo’s Restaurant has a problem with is that a simple clerical error — like forgetting to fill in the box asking for the restaurant’s name — could draw a fine of hundreds of dollars.

DiMillo doesn’t have a staff of lawyers and accountants to take care of his paperwork. And if 150 forms are filled out with the same mistake, that could be a major financial headache — or an expensive legal headache to fight the fines — even for a successful small business with sales of $7.3 million and payroll of nearly $3 million a year.

Injecting what he sees as common sense into the way federal regulations are devised and enforced was a big thrust of the trip to Washington that DiMillo, chairman of the Maine Restaurant Association, made in April, when he visited with Maine lawmakers.

And that’s why DiMillo supports a bid by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, to require federal agencies to do a better job periodically assessing whether federal regulations’ impact on small businesses are needlessly burdensome and costly.

Snowe’s bill — with provisions to expand agencies’ use of panels to review proposed rules’ effect on small businesses and take 1 percent of an agency’s budget for salaries if it doesn’t review a regulation at least once a decade — would give small businesses “a seat at the table and a voice early on” in the regulatory process, DiMillo said.

There was no good reason to issue the regulation in which “small clerical errors are seen as just a grave mistake as hiring someone without proof of legal residency,” DiMillo said.

Spurred by Maine small-business people like DiMillo, Snowe has made passage of her regulatory reform bill — co-authored with GOP Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — a personal priority this year.

When Snowe’s bill didn’t get a vote earlier this year as an amendment to a broader small-business bill, she helped block the entire bill from coming to a vote. When her regulatory reform bill was brought to the floor June 9, as an amendment to an economic development bill, it got 53 votes, falling short of the 60 votes it needed.

But Snowe got a hearing on her bill last week. She was one of four senators who testified about their own regulatory reform proposals.

The hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs showed the political popularity of regulatory reform during tough economic times and demonstrated that it won’t be easy to assemble a legislative approach that can draw enough consensus in the Senate — let alone the GOP-led House.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the governmental affairs committee, touted her own regulatory overhaul proposal before Snowe and the other senators who aren’t on the committee testified.

Collins’ Clearing Unnecessary Regulatory Burdens Act would put in statute the current administrative requirement for agencies to analyze the costs and benefits of regulations and include, among other things, a provision that could address the issue DiMillo described, by easing penalties on small businesses that make first-time, inadvertent paperwork mistakes.

Other committee members are working on regulatory reform bills, including Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas and GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

But the Obama administration is pushing to be allowed to continue with its own regulatory reform push, which includes a review of regulations that White House officials say has identified hundreds of millions of dollars in annual regulatory costs and the potential of billions in savings, without new legislation.

Collins said she and Sen. Joe Lieberman have talked about trying to merge all of the proposals into one bill. But Lieberman, I-Conn., said during the hearing that he has qualms about erecting “roadblocks that will make it difficult or impossible to create or maintain important protections for public health, safety, the environment or other vital concerns.”

Just as regulations can impose costs on businesses, it’s important to remember the economic benefits, said Lieberman.

Snowe said her legislation attempts to force federal agencies to do what current law mandates: review every rule once a decade to determine whether it should be made less burdensome or eliminated.

Snowe is the top Republican on the Senate Small Business Committee. She calls her bill a job-creation measure, noting that at a committee hearing last year she was told that a 30 percent reduction in the regulatory costs for a 10-person company would save nearly $32,000, enough to hire an additional worker.

Snowe said she has made changes to the bill to develop more bipartisan consensus. The initial version would have wiped a rule off the books if no review were done in the prescribed time.

In an interview last week, Snowe dismissed some of the criticism of her effort as the “politics of simplicity,” in which “everything is reduced to talking points and to extreme arguments rather than a rational discussion of what is workable and what isn’t, what is practical, what is impractical, when it comes to regulation.”

Snowe said she is willing to work for consensus on how to do what must be done to at least some degree: make the federal regulatory system more rational and less cumbersome.

Snowe said she has a history of bipartisanship and is “more than happy to work with anybody. Let’s have a debate and let’s work through the issues and reach a comfort level. I never said I had the monopoly on all the best ideas for regulatory reform.”

MaineToday Media Washington Bureau Chief Jonathan Riskind can be contacted at 791-6280 or at:

jriskind@mainetoday.com