In Georgia, it takes more than 1,200 pages to catalog all the rules and regulations surrounding social services to the disabled, elderly and mentally ill. In other states, all those requirements take up as few as 40 pages.

If House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, succeeds, many of those regulations, spread across multiple agencies, could go away.

Ralston last year created the Red Tape Watch initiative with a goal of helping businesses and other organizations perform more efficiently while also protecting the interests of patients, consumers and the environment.

Whitney Fuchs, CEO of the nonprofit Georgia Community Support and Solutions, wants to see Ralston’s plan succeed. Fuchs testified at one of the special committee’s public forums about the problems he sees spread across the state’s alphabet soup of social services agencies.

“There’s really a layering of policies on top of policies,” Fuchs said in an interview. From the Department of Community Health, the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities and the Department of Public Health, the regulations come fast and frequently, he said.

“This is not a rant against policies that should be in place to protect individuals,” Fuchs said. “This is about, can you abbreviate some of these things? You don’t have to have this untenable amount of regulatory language in delivering care.”

Fuchs told the Red Tape committee that training staff and complying with the regulatory burden cost his agency hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that could go toward actually helping people.

Ralston said he’s heard similar complaints from business owners across the state.

“They felt very frustrated and really wanted an outlet to be able to voice their complaints,” Ralston said. “I thought this was an idea that tied in nicely with our tax reform initiative, which was designed to make Georgia more competitive from a small business standpoint.”

Ralston wants the committee to create a kind of test that agencies and lawmakers can apply to proposed rules and regulations “so there will be some predictability and consistency from department to department so small businesses can have a little stability.”

“I’m not suggesting at all that every bureaucratic rule is a bad thing,” Ralston said. “I’m just saying we need the proper balance, and that’s what this group is looking to accomplish.”

The committee’s leader, Rep. David Knight, R-Griffin, told lawmakers and state officials at a recent legislative conference that it aims to “strike the proper balance of maintaining public safety without jeopardizing our competitive environment.”

Businesses, he said, want “predictability, certainty and consistency.”

Fuchs agrees.

“We really want to get our costs down,” he said. “Everybody wants that. We don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of money on administration, and the state doesn’t want us to, either.”

In the next few months, Ralston said, Fuchs and others should see some progress. The committee will continue to take comments from businesses and taxpayers during the upcoming legislative session with a goal of completing its work next spring.

“At the end of the day,” Ralston said, “we need to make sure we’re doing everything possible to sustain jobs and grow jobs.”