As most of you know from reading the local news, the business community is in a bitter battle this General Session with several tax exemption elimination bills on the way to Governor Ritter. Yesterday, one of our small business members told me that it would cost his company $85,000 and he would have to lay off two employees. So much for job creation.
Our lobbyist, RJ Hicks, sent an email reply the other day to explain why these bills are so detrimental to the business community and that the business community DOES support education. Here are his words of wisdom.
“The short answer to your question is that if business does not lose their tax credits and exemptions, the General Assembly will be looking for that money from somewhere. We could offer some ideas, but these measures for the most part will pass. The Chamber’s point of view is that business is reeling now, job losses have been substantial, unemployment continues at levels at or above 8%, and businesses have had to cut back on many expenditures including health care for their employees and other benefits as well. What I think is missed sometimes is that business is what makes the whole system work. Without jobs and healthy businesses, revenues go down and everyone in the food chain suffers- state-county-local governments.
Therefore school funding suffers. Business has been assessed over one billion in new fees from the 2009 legislative session on top of the economic woes we have been facing. So we have been asked several times to pay our share. The Chamber supports education, always has and always will. We need an educated work force and K-12 delivers that work force.
Tough times for all, but we must also look at setting realistic priorities for our government. We have to start to say we will focus on good schools, higher education, better roads, and workable safety net for social issues. But after that, we need to start making tough choices on what we fund. This cannot be business as usual. The Chamber also supports fixing the budget mess caused by our competing constitutional issues.
Unless we can find some real leadership to begin to tackle that issue, we will end up a sub-par state always settling for second best.”
Join our business advocacy efforts and check out www.jeffcobusinesslobby.org for more information.
Much success in business,
Amy Sherman
Welcome to the West Chamber blog! We hope you enjoy the new look of our website and find it simple to navigate. The website was designed with members’ feedback on what features they used most often. We will be adding pages/features over the course of the next two weeks so visit often to see this helpful work in progress. A huge thank you to the team at EduCyber for their wonderful work on the site and help in making this process virtually painless.
The West Chamber continues to develop our social media campaign. If you attended the Chairman’s Inaugural Celebration in January, you saw that we had our Twitter live (@westchamber) and members tweeted during the event. We gave our members a sneak preview of the new website to our Facebook group (www.facebook.com/westchamber) and asked for feedback on the initial peek. And I’m writing this from a hotel in San Fran at the Western Association of Chamber Executives conference where I am about to go into a Social Media for Chambers breakout session to learn more about what we can do for our members.
We have kicked off 2010 with several High Tech/High Touch tools and are excited about this year! Thank you for being a member of the West Chamber Serving Jefferson County!
Amy
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