Week Seventeen - April 30, 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.

The past week in Concord saw the budget issues take center stage, as the Senate Finance Committee, the House Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee began final work on amendments which are designed to help address a projected budget shortfall of over $200 million dollars.

In the House Finance Committee, a spreadsheet of over 1,000 lines detailed Executive Branch spending cuts that are part of a proposed amendment to SB 450, which is the vehicle which will be used for addressing the bulk of the budget issues. After spending the week looking at the cuts, the Finance Committee today is reviewing several amendments which look at the revenue side. These include a new gambling amendment from Representative Steve Vaillancourt of Manchester; an amendment which would reduce the threshold at which businesses need to file BET returns (down to $50,000); a special assessment on banks, insurance companies and utilities which would be used to fund the courts; and an insurance premium tax increase (up to $2.00).

Just down the hall, the House Ways and Means Committee took straw votes to pass several amendments intended to raise revenues. The Committee also took a straw vote and favored repeal of the LLC tax.

Among the measures approved were:

• A 5% capital gains tax;
• An increase in the insurance premium tax to 2%;
• An 8% estate tax on assets over $2M; and
• An electric generation tax to replace the existing consumption tax.

The proposals in the House Finance Committee will be voted on by the Committee on Thursday, May 6th. All of the items should be on the House floor on Wednesday, May 12th. After that, these changes go back to the Senate and are sure to result in Committees of Conference to work out the differences between the two bodies. Right now, the House and Senate rules call for the session to conclude on June 2nd, but more and more people are beginning to have their doubts about whether the legislature will be able to meet that deadline. We’ll see.

You can rest assured that your Chamer will vociferously fight a number of these new tax proposals. It is unconscionable that our legislators would even consider some of these ideas after what our businesses have been throught in the last 18 months.

Municipalities In The Broadband Business?

You may recall that several weeks ago the House Science, Technology and Energy Committee sent HB 1242 to interim study. That bill would have allowed municipalities to use public funds to construct broadband systems. The Committee has held a couple of meetings and now there is already a push being generated by the Municipal Association to pass language similar to what was in HB 1242 by placing it into a Senate bill. This week, there was a hearing in the Committee to amend SB 428 to add language which would allow municipalities to use public funds to build broadband infrastructure anywhere in a municipality (not just in areas which are underserved, which is what the current law provides for). The full Committee is going to vote on this bill on Tuesday. The Chamber continues to oppose this idea. We believe that it is a very bad idea for government to compete with private business. Government should take care of governmental concerns, and leave business concerns to businesses.

Jobs Bills Reach The House Floor

On Wednesday, the House is going to vote on two jobs bills which the Chamber has strongly supported. One is SB 501, which is the Governor's workshare program, intended to help businesses stave off layoffs. That has been recommended as ought to pass by the House Labor Committee. The other is SB 383, which is the bill which the Chamber supported to increase the NOL threshold to $10 million dollars. Unfortunately, that bill reaches the floor with a recommendation from a majority of the Ways and Means Committee to delete the NOL piece of the bill. The majority was concerned about the revenue impacts on the state. The minority of the Committee took the step of filing a minority report and will be urging the full House to pass the bill with the NOL section included. Let's hope that the full House realizes the importance of getting this NOL threshold passed now.

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