Connecticut business leaders are planting their flag on several legislative priorities going into the new General Assembly session this week. The Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA) released a round-up of these priorities late last week.
CBIA sees three main pillars of legislation that, according to them, could help small business owners in Connecticut and taxpayers more generally. These include workforce investment, tax reforms, and changes to the business climate.
Several of these changes are far from new suggestions. CBIA has long advocated for changes to the state’s business climate, which their leaders have argued includes too many rules, restrictions, and regulations for small businesses and start-ups. These include requirements to provide family leave, healthcare, and other benefits to employees at businesses of all sizes, not just when staffing levels reach federally regulated levels.
A long list of regulations, CBIA President Chris DiPentima told CII last month, can be difficult for a small business owner to keep track of, and the bureaucracy involved in meeting these requirements can be difficult to navigate.
Connecticut also carries some of the highest business costs from income and corporate taxes, which can place a burden on small start-ups.
To combat these challenges, CBIA is bringing back some suggested solutions it has previously argued for, though unsuccessfully so far. They’re hoping to finally construct a healthcare solution that would allow small businesses to band together and buy insurance products as a group, allowing them to negotiate better rates with insurers. This idea, called Associated Health Plans, gained some ground in the legislature last year but failed to fully pass into state law.
“This is a great opportunity,” says Chris Davis, CBIA’s VP for Public Policy. “It’s available in other states and Connecticut could really push forward this year and lower costs for hundreds of thousands of small businesses and employers and still provide high-quality health insurance.”
Davis says the proposal has interest from a variety of sectors across the state, including bankers, brewers, and nonprofits.
In addition to healthcare, CBIA is looking to incentivize expansion of the biotech industry, expand the use of tax credits for businesses, and restoring the “pass-through entity tax credit” which they argue would make $60 million more available for small businesses.
Chief among their concerns, however, are the state’s fiscal guardrails, which have helped Connecticut pay back an increasing portion of pension debt owed from past administrations. That debt cuts deeply into annual revenues and the guardrails allow the Office of the State Comptroller to use revenues from Wall Street investments to pay down that debt.
“They’ve really been the catalyst for stability in the state over the past several years,” says Davis, arguing that keeping them in place is important for supporting businesses.
The legislative session officially begins on Wednesday, February 7th and Davis remains confident that CBIA will get at least a few of their goals through to the finish line.
“We’ve had ongoing conversations with the legislature and the governor’s office going into the legislative session,” he says. “And we’re confident we can continue that on a bipartisan basis going forward.”
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