Week Fifteen - April 16, 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.

A subcommittee of the House Ways & Means Committee met on Wednesday to work on SB 383, the Net Operating Loss bill that was requested this session by the Chamber. Unfortunately, the subcommittee session was a rocky one. Several members expressed the opinion that, given the State’s budget problems, this was not an opportune time to raise the NOL limits. One member of the subcommittee said that it is hard to know who is in worse financial shape - the government or businesses. Representative Bill Johnson of Gilford, on the other hand, made the great point that this is exactly the right time to pass a bill like this, because it helps businesses make it out of the recession. As the Chamber has been arguing all along, the last thing we should be doing as a state is telling businesses that, once you crawl out of the recession and start making a profit again, we’re going to take that money away from you in taxes. We are hopeful that we will be able to convince enough members of the Ways & Means Committee of the critical importance of this bill to New Hampshire businesses, and get the House to pass SB 383. This bill is the top priority of the Chamber for the 2010 session.

Fireworks On the LLC Tax and Reasonable Compensation

On the day before the Ways & Means Committee dealt with the above SB 383, the Committee held a hearing on SB 497, the Senate’s bill to address reasonable compensation and the interest and dividends tax (known also as the LLC tax). That very morning before the hearing, the Legislative Budget Office published a fiscal note which had been supplied by the Department of Revenue Administration, which indicated that the fiscal impact of the bill would include a total business tax loss to the State of over $329 million!! Needless to say, the fact that this fiscal note was so extraordinary in its scope and was issued just before the hearing took place raised quite a few eyebrows (to say the least). Nashua’s own Representative David Campbell testified in support of the bill and raised the question of whether the time had come for the legislature to create its own independent fiscal analysis staff.

For what it’s worth, our Chamber remains highly skeptical of the Department of Revenue’s work on this fiscal note, and of its intentions relative to fairly allowing NH’s business community any sort of relief. It is obviously incumbent on the Committee to probe the relative strengths or weaknesses of this fiscal note. Let’s hope that the Committee will forge ahead and get SB 497 passed. We will be working with other business groups in that effort.

Telephone Pole Property Exemption Loss

The telecom industry (and, we think, businesses as a whole) suffered a defeat on Tuesday, when the House Local & Regulated Revenues Committee voted 15-4 to recommend that SB 492 be killed. This is a bill that keeps in place a long-standing exemption against property taxes for poles and conduits used in telecommunications. Local governments have never had the legal right to levy property taxes on that equipment, so the elimination of this exemption will in effect constitute the creation of a new tax. And this new tax would be directly contrary to the critical interest we have as a state that the telecom industry get broadband infrastructure into place as quickly as possible. What are they thinking? You can expect that the telecom industry and business groups will be working hard on this one, too.

Revenue Issues Continue To Dog the State, while Gaming Remains on Horizon

On the heels of the budget cuts that the Governor announced on Monday and which he is making by way of Executive Order, the House and Senate Finance Committees held an extraordinary joint hearing on proposed amendments to SB 450, which would further cut the State budget by $60 million. The bulk of the cuts affect healthcare-related services administrated by the Department of Health & Human Services. Against this backdrop, and with many people in the audience at the Finance hearing who would be impacted by the cuts, the House Local & Regulated Revenues Committee just up the stairs simultaneously voted on SB 489, the gaming bill. The Committee voted 13-7 to recommend that the House kill the bill. You can expect the House debate on this bill next Wednesday to be one of the most memorable in a long time. It could be close. The substantial cuts to HHS undoubtedly will be looming large in the background when the members make their decision. By this time next week, we will be able to report on what the House has decided to do, and there will be a better sense of what the last six weeks of this legislative session are going to be like.

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