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Week Seventeen - May 15, 2009
This electronic publication, known as The Advocate,
is brought to you each Friday by your Greater Nashua Chamber of
Commerce, in partnership with our friends at Devine Millimet &
Branch, and ActiveEdge. Please use this piece to review what has
happened in Concord this past week, read about our Chamber's lobbying
efforts relating to those activities, and preview what we are
doing on behalf of our Chamber members in the coming week.
This Week’s
Update
There was some good news and some bad news coming out of Concord
for businesses this week.
First,
The Bad News...
On Tuesday, a subcommittee of the House Labor Committee voted
by a 3-0 margin to recommend the passage of SB 40,
the WARN legislation. Although Chamber President Chris Williams
and Advocacy Committee Chair Jeff Rose were in attendance to offer
additional research based on the public hearing held two weeks
ago, the subcommittee made the decision to take very little information
from them and other members of the public who were in the room.
The main topic of discussion in the subcommittee was whether
the threshold of applicability of the bill should be set at companies
employing 75 people, or those employing 100 people. The subcommittee
decided to keep the number at 75, which is the same threshold
approved by the Senate. Unfortunately, the subcommittee did not
touch at all on what we think is one of the most important issues
with respect to this bill: the provision which allows corporate
parents to be held liable.
We have said it before and we’ll say it again: at a time
when New Hampshire is desperately competing for jobs, and at a
time when the businesses are seeing their Unemployment Insurance
taxes go up significantly, the last thing in the world we want
to be doing as a state is to be making New Hampshire a less attractive
place for businesses to set up shop.
This bill should be voted on by the full Labor Committee on Tuesday
afternoon, and Chamber President Williams is facilitating a full-scale
grassroots campaign with companies who employ 75-100 workers,
to impress upon the Labor Committee how bad this bill is for those
companies and asking those legislators to either amend the bill
on Tuesday or re-refer it to committee for further work.
Now
For The Good News...
On Wednesday, the full Senate voted to kill HB 580,
the medical records privacy bill. Although this bill obviously
was well-intentioned, it was going to establish medical records
privacy restrictions that far exceeded what is already required
under the stringent federal HIPAA provisions. A coalition of no
less than several dozen healthcare and business groups, including
your Chamber, came out in opposition to the bill. Nashua’s
own Senator Peggy Gilmour spoke in opposition to the bill on the
Senate floor. Hopefully, we have seen the last of this bill for
the remainder of this legislative session. (Under the House and
Senate rules, an issue killed in the first year of the session
generally cannot be taken up again in the second year.)
Now, Back
To The Bad News...
Unemployment Trust Fund - On Tuesday, the House Labor Committee
will take up an amendment to SB 129 which is being proposed by
the Department of Employment Security. This amendment is intended
to address the looming depletion of the unemployment trust fund
(the fund is expected to be used up by the first quarter of 2010).
As we understand that the amendment will read, there will be
a number of provisions including:
- An increase in the taxable wage base (from $8000 to $14,000), to be phased in over three years
- An additional half-percent surcharge;
- An increase in the threshold for determining who is a positive-rated employer entitled to a discount;
- Establishment of a new schedule for chronic negative rated employers.
This amendment certainly puts us in a quandary. If the trust
fund gets depleted and the state has to borrow funds from the
federal government, employers will lose an important federal tax
credit. While this legislation may ultimately be necessary, we
think it is important to look at this bill in context of the larger
picture that is happening in the legislature vis-à-vis
the impact of their actions on our business climate: there
is really no bill this year which we can point to as something
that benefits all of the State’s businesses.
Indeed, bills like SB 40 are attempting to impose new and stringent
regulations that are not universally accepted as being beneficial
to the health of the state’s businesses and its workers
(as evidenced by the fact that the Senate voted 12-10 on the bill).
We need to impress upon the legislators that businesses need some
sort of relief this session, and when you look at this Unemployment
Trust Fund issue in connection with bad bills like Senate Bill
40, one has to wonder what exactly our legislators are thinking
in terms of trying to give businesses any sort of relief at a
time when they need it most.
Acknowledgements
This weekly update is made possible by the generous support of
Devine Millimet
& Branch, one of the state’s top law firms and our
Chamber’s contracted representative in Concord. If your
business has a legislative or local issue that needs strategic
consulting and attention, they are a valuable resource that can
help navigate you through both local and state processes.
This weekly update is designed and maintained by our friends
at ActiveEdge,
and we thank them for their help in delivering this piece to your
inbox every Friday!
If you have questions about this update, or comments to share
with us about other issues in Concord, please email Chris Williams
at cwilliams@nashuachamber.com.
We want to be sure we're representing you to the best of our ability,
so do not hesitate to reach out to us!
J.
Christopher Williams
President & CEO
Greater Nashua Chamber of Commerce
151 Main St.
Nashua, NH 03060
Phone: 603.881.8333
Fax: 603.881.7323
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