Week Fourteen - April 09, 2010

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

Big things are happening this week.

This past Wednesday, the House Ways & Means Committee held a work session on SB 383, the Chamber’s net operating loss legislation. Yet one more time, Chamber Advocacy Committee Chair David Heath of Melanson & Heath made the trip up to Concord to meet with the members of the House Ways & Means Committee and to help them work through the details of this bill.

Unfortunately, most of the Committee’s time that day was taken up by representatives of the Department of Revenue Administration, who laid out their position on how much revenue they speculate SB 383 would actually cost the State. As expected, the Department presented numbers far above what we would consider to be reasonable, which is in keeping with their practice in past situations when we’ve attempted to reform NOL (their past estimates have always exaggerated actual decreases to state funding).

Representative Almy, the Committee Chair, has sent the bill to a subcommittee, which will conduct further inquiries into the effects of the legislation. We are hoping to get a good vote out of this Committee when it finally takes action. Regardless of the Committee vote, we will be working to get this passed when it comes to the floor. We think that this bill is the “jobs bill” of 2010.

We also need to give a tip of hat to SB 383 prime sponsor Bette Lasky. Senator Lasky was in the middle of a Senate session on Wednesday when the bill came up before the Ways & Means Committee, and she made a tremendous effort to get away from the Senate long enough to make an appearance in House Ways & Means across the street. That, folks, is commitment.

Senate Ways & Means Committee Looks At HB 1607

Meanwhile, the Reasonable Compensation saga continues, as the Senate Ways & Means Committee held a hearing on HB 1607 on Tuesday. It turned out to be a pretty lengthy affair, and the witnesses included Chamber President Chris Williams, who told the Committee that while we appreciate the work the House Ways & Means Committee had done on HB 1607, we believe that SB 497, the Senate’s version of this same issue, is the preferable bill. It seems quite likely that there will be a very interesting conference committee in the next month or so to determine which of the two bills is going to prevail. SB 497 has been scheduled for a hearing on the House side this Tuesday, April 13th, in the Ways & Means Committee.

Senate Votes To Repeal Campground Tax

One of our most pleasant responsibilities as a Chamber is to let you know when the legislature has voted to actually repeal a tax. That happy event took place this week when the Senate voted to pass HB 1445, which repeals the “campsite tax”. This was another one of the taxes that was created at the end of the 2009 budget session, and it had made campgrounds part of the rooms and meals tax. Expected revenue from that new tax for this current fiscal year has not even come close to the Department of Revenue’s predictions, and after the repeal of the tax this week, the State is no longer including it in future revenue projections.

A New Tax On Telephone Poles And Conduits?

But, all is not good news on the tax repeal front. As we have been reporting over the last several weeks, the House is considering SB 492, a bill which would continue for another two years an existing property tax exemption for telecommunications poles and conduits. The Chamber, along with a number of other businesses and business organizations, supports this bill.

Municipalities have never had the authority to assess a property tax on this telecom property. As a result, if this bill does not pass and the exemption is repealed, that action will in effect create a brand new tax. That’s the last thing we need in New Hampshire, especially in this economy. It makes a lot of sense to use to keep the exemption in place and to conduct the study called for in the bill. It is very unclear at this point as to what the House is going to do with this bill.

Governor Announces HHS Budget Cuts

The State’s budget situation became even more dire at week’s end with the publication of a plan that the Governor wants to implement concerning cuts in state services, especially services provided by businesses which provide health care to the State’s Medicaid population. These cuts amount to $85 million by the end of Fiscal Year 2011 (June 30, ‘11). This action of the Governor, and the current projection of a $220 million budget shortfall, is likely to only intensify the already heated discussions going on concerning the gaming bill, which is going to be voted on by the House Regulated Revenues Committee next week.

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