Fighting City Hall
If Erroll Tyler were the chief executive of a big pharmaceutical company looking to set up shop here in Massachusetts, you can bet that all of government would be beating a path to his door to do whatever it takes to be helpful. Erroll Tyler is a chauffeur by trade, not a CEO. But he is a man with a dream, and he has spent six long years pursuing it with the same passion and stamina he did as a high hurdler at Lynn Classical all those years ago.
There isn't a pol in America who doesn't love small business, the engine of our economy. Yada, yada, yada. This should be a column about how a little guy, with grit and an idea, and a little encouragement -- or at least not discouragement -- from his local government started and grew a small business. It is, instead, a column about how the bureaucrats in Cambridge, sanctuary city, have blocked him at every turn.
You don't have to have a PhD from Harvard or MIT to understand Tyler's concept: He wants to do for Cambridge what those ubiquitous Duck Tours have done for Boston. Quack. But rather than using restored World War II amphibious landing vehicles, Tyler wants to use new state-of-the-art Hydra-Terras, 49-passenger buslike vehicles. Tyler wants to start with two vehicles that would tour through Cambridge and then go into Boston and wind up in Boston Harbor and the Charles River.
Cambridge, however, wants nothing to do with it. Tyler's company, Nautical Tours, needs a jitney license from Cambridge to pick up and drop off passengers. After deferring a decision following its initial hearing in 2004, the licensing commission rejected his application after a second hearing last year. The reason, according to the rejection letter: Cambridge already has two or three trolley tours and doesn't need any more. The commission also worried about traffic congestion and where Tyler would get into the river. The head of the licensing commission didn't return my calls.
Tyler isn't easily discouraged. In 15 years at Dav El Chauffeured Transportation Network, the big Boston-based limo company, he has worked his way up to head of training. ``He is an exemplary employee," says his boss, Scott Solombrino, Dav El's chief executive. ``He has driven everyone from kings and presidents to heads of state."
``I wouldn't know how to give up anything in my life," says the 55-year-old Tyler, who grew up as one of seven kids on Arlington Street in Lynn. Earlier this year he got in front of Cambridge City Council the only way he could: during the public comment period. He and eight members of his executive committee each took their allotted three minutes to spell out their business plan. Now, in a hearing Tuesday, Tyler will get his third chance before the licensing commission.
He'll be bringing some new muscle with him: the Institute for Justice, a libertarian, nonprofit public interest law firm in Arlington, Va. Jeff Rowes, an institute attorney, sees Tyler's situation as a case study in how licensing is often used to block new competitors, particularly in the transportation business. The statute Cambridge is using to derail Tyler, Rowes says, was enacted generations ago to protect railroads from motor vehicle competition, and gives cities like Cambridge the right to deny any license it believes does not serve ``public convenience and necessity."
But that standard, Rowes says, turns the ordinary rules of business upside down by forcing entrepreneurs to prove there is a need for their services that existing companies can't satisfy. ``Instead of consumers and business people deciding whether a new service is needed in a free market, bureaucrats -- often in close consultation with a start-up business's would-be competitors -- make that decision," Rowes says.
All the man is asking for is a chance. If Tyler's tours aren't needed, consumers will tell him soon enough.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 