Survey Results and SB California Bills

From: Scott Hauge
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2007 6:14 AM
To: Small Business California
Subject: Survey Results and SB California Bills

Our survey results are in. We received 420 responses and the results were as follows:
1.The Rising Cost of Health Care- For the third year this was number 1 with 89% saying it was a top priority or high priority.
2.Quality of Public Education. 76% top or high priority.
3.Infrastructure 69%
4. Workers Compensation and Immigration- 66%
5.Regulation-63%
6.Taxation-55%
7.Energy 52%

So this will the agenda for Small Business California for 2007.
Other interesting results were that 60% of the respondents supported employers,employees and government being required to pay for health insurance, 97% supported requiring state agencies to consider the impact of regulations before final regulations are issued and 91% supported expanding vocational education.

You can get the results in detail by going to www.smallbusinesscalifornia.org
Last week was a crazy week in Sacramento as all bills needed to have backing by last Friday. This was a problem because hundreds of bills did not have the language from legislative council as late as Thursday. Small Business California is sponsoring two bills AB 1694[ LaMalfa] which deals with return to work policy and SB869[Ridley Thomas] which deals with workers compensation fraud. We will need your support on these as they come to committee and we need to thank Assemblyman La Malfa and Senator Ridley Thomas for introducing these bills.

One big disappointment was that we did not get introduced a bill that would allow most small business owners who have a 125 plan to be able to take the same tax break for themselves that their employees enjoy. This even though we pay for them, administer them and under the Governors and Speaker Nunez health proposals will be required to buy them. This is just not right and small businesses around the state should be outraged.