This year?s General Assembly passed promising legislation and other measures that may hurt employers, but they also successfully killed some bills that were not friendly to business, representatives of Maryland business groups said Wednesday.
But already they are focusing on next year or a special session this year, when major tax increases will be on the agenda.
“We?re taking a breather before the shoe drops,” said Kathleen Snyder, president of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce. “We just urge caution when we?re talking about tax increases.”
This year was “sort of like spring training,” said Tom Saquella, president of the Maryland Retailers Association, as the House Ways and Means Committee held hearings on a range of tax increases on income, sales, gasoline and entertainment.
Revenues will be the biggest issue next year, said Donald Fry, head of the Greater Baltimore Committee.
Several leaders said they agreed that an important win for the business community was a bill to increase payouts to owners of property taken by local government. “It was reasonable and just compensation,” Saquella said. “That was certainly a big plus for us.”
One of the worst business losses was on the living wage, making Maryland the first state in the country to mandate payment of $11.30 an hour to workers on government contracts in the central part of the state and $8.50 in rural areas, including Carroll and Harford counties.
“We thought we had killed that off,” said Snyder. Even though it affects a limited number of employers, Fry said. “Unfortunately, the living wage provides another dark cloud that the state is going to be saddled with” as companies outside Maryland contemplate moving here.
On the other hand, “we had a lot of success this session in killing bad business bills,” Snyder said. This included maintaining Maryland?s standard for “contributory negligence” in lawsuits, rather than for “comparative fault.”
“We played mostly defense” this session, Saquella said. “You had a lot more liberal-leaning legislators” due to the November election.
The business community was able to defeat a number of labor-backed bills increasing regulation of the workplace on overtime, sick leave and even specifying meal breaks, Saquella said.
He and Snyder said that business was able to live with a $40 per week increase in unemployment benefits to $380 a week, convincing the legislature to reject a proposal for a $120 increase over three years. “Employment is robust now,” Snyder said, and the unemployment fund can handle the increase without raising the taxes employers pay into it.
