Week Sixteen - April 23, 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.

On Monday, after a lengthy review process by the Chamber’s State Advocacy Committee and Board of Directors, the Chamber announced that it was throwing its support behind SB 489, the gaming bill. As the Chamber announced in its press release, this decision was predicated on three things:

1. Surveys of the Chamber’s membership which showed very strong support among regional businesses for expanded gambling.
   
   
2. The potential for significant positive economic development opportunities, such as operational support for commuter rail and other capital investments, in the southern New Hampshire region in both the near and distant future.
   
   
3. The potential for both short-term job opportunities and new permanent jobs in the southern New Hampshire region through the construction and operation of a resort casino and convention center in Hudson. The Hudson development would be by far the largest single economic development project in the Greater Nashua area in recent years, and for years to come.

On Wednesday, however, on the heels of the Governor’s late announcement that he would veto SB 489, the House voted by a margin of 212-158 to kill the bill. It was shaping up to be a much closer vote and the Governor’s last minute entry into the process last Friday may well have been the difference-maker.

Aside from the more general policy questions associated with this bill, the defeat of SB 489 means that there are no revenue-based solutions currently on the table in either the House or the Senate which would stave off the substantial cuts to people receiving health care services through the Department of Health and Human Services. Those cuts are contained in an amendment to SB 450 which had a hearing in the House Finance Committee on Monday (although the public did not have an opportunity to speak; the Committee heard only from state agencies). It looks like hospitals, for instance, will once again be asked by the State to take a hit.

Just what happens in the legislature in the next 6 weeks is likely to be dictated by the answer to a single question: can the legislators stomach the prospect of eliminating those health care services? Don’t be surprised to see SB 450 go back to the Senate with the proposed cuts which will set the stage for the Committee of Conference for the 2010 legislative session. With the House and Senate going in opposite directions at the moment, that Committee of Conference would not be for the faint of heart. And since the LLC tax came out of the waning hours of the Committee of Conference on the budget last June, we are going to have to be vigilant to make sure that no similar anti-business revenue solution ends up getting created and imposed on the businesses of the State out of desperation as a last ditch solution.

House Eliminates The Property Tax Exemption For Telephone Poles

Businesses in New Hampshire suffered a defeat on Wednesday, when the House voted by a margin of 222-129 to allow a long-standing property tax exemption for telecommunications poles and conduits to expire in June. This means that these poles and conduits will, for the first time ever, be lawfully subject to local property taxes.

What sort of a message does this send? On one side of the third floor corridor in the Legislative Office Building last week, the House Science and Technology Committee was urging the telecom industry to hasten its build-out of broadband infrastructure in the State. Directly across the hallway, the House Local and Regulated Revenues Committee was making the decision that telecom infrastructure should be subject to local property taxes. This is not a good result. It is important for the legislature to look at the big picture when it comes to taxation.

Net Operating Loss Vote In The House Ways and Means Committee

Speaking of taxation, on Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee took its vote on SB 383, the net operating loss bill. The Committee voted 11-5 to amend the bill to remove the NOL provision and pass only the ERZ Zone section of the measure. At least the Committee did not completely discard the NOL issue; the expressed understanding in the Committee is that they will make NOLs a specific issue to be addressed by the proposed business tax study commission which is in an amendment to SB 450, one of the budget-related bills.

The reason the majority of the Committee took this action is their fear - which we think is misplaced - that an increase in NOL thresholds will hurt state revenues at a critical time when those revenues are most needed. As we have been arguing, however, a recession is precisely when NOL laws have to be improved. The NOL increase would help businesses out of the recession and protect or even increase the state’s tax base.

Better News From The Senate

The landscape for New Hampshire businesses was much brighter in the Senate this week than it was in the House. On Wednesday, the Senate voted to refer HB 1315 to interim study. This was a bill which the Chamber lobbied against because it would have altered the existing workers’ compensation lien structure in a way which we think would have led to an increase in workers’ compensation premiums. The Senate also passed a version of HB 478, a bill to regulate the use of radio frequency identification devices, or RFIDs. The version of HB 478 which had passed the House and came to the Senate was extremely problematic for business as it contained many onerous provisions which would have spelled trouble for all sorts of industries. The amendment which the Senate passed this week was one which had been approved by a study committee that looked at this issue last summer, and which was recommended by the House Commerce Committee before it ultimately was overturned on the House Floor. The Chamber joined with a host of other business groups in supporting that original language, so we were pleased to see that outcome.

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