Good morning! My name is Christopher Emigholz, and I am the Chief Government Affairs Officer for the New Jersey Business & Industry Association (NJBIA), the largest and most impactful voice for business in the state. Thank you to Speaker Coughlin, Chairwoman Timberlake and all the sponsors of these pro-small business bills before you today that NJBIA is very happy to support.
We all have heard about how running a small business in New Jersey is not easy. Your constituents and my members talk about the excessive costs and over-regulation, especially compared to other states. Today on top of that, we hear about how hard the pandemic was on small businesses, and they are now dealing with inflation, supply-chain issues and the inability to find enough workers. If you drive through any downtown business district you see evidence of shuttered businesses, the workforce crisis or increased prices out of anyone’s control.
This package of bills provides small businesses a helping hand to weather this storm, be better able to compete and hopefully grow and create jobs.
NJBIA supports each bill in the package:
- A-2146 (Reynolds-Jackson, Wimberly, Sumter) – NJBIA supports this legislation because it will provide greater government contract access to these historically disadvantaged small businesses that need the support and may have difficulty navigating the government procurement process.
- A-3424 (Sumter, Reynolds-Jackson, Moen) – NJBIA supports this legislation because improving small business access to government contracts is important to level the business playing field for all businesses.
- A-4748 (Moriarty, Haider, Sampson) – NJBIA supports this legislation because the Business Action Center is an important small business resource and measuring its success will improve its responsiveness to the needs of the business community.
- A-4749 (Coughlin, Swain, Timberlake) – NJBIA supports this legislation because running a small business in New Jersey is difficult, and a new state manual to support their successful operation would be beneficial.
- A-4750 (Jaffer, Caputo, Atkins) – NJBIA supports this legislation because finding appropriate commercial space can be challenging in New Jersey, and this bill will make that search process easier.
- A-4751 (Mosquera, Speight, DeAngelo) – NJBIA supports this legislation because running a small business in New Jersey is challenging and learning from experienced small business mentors could make starting a business
- A-4752 (Tully, Benson, Chaparro) – NJBIA supports this legislation because businesses need an online presence to be successful today, yet small businesses often lack the capacity and know-how that this bill could provide to help establish that online business presence.
- A-4753 (Freiman, Park, Lampitt) – NJBIA supports this legislation because compliance is not easy for small businesses in our State, and this bill will allow the state to be less heavy-handed when regulating small businesses that may have committed a minor rule violation.
NJBIA is also delighted to see that a majority of the members of this committee and a majority of members of the Assembly Majority Caucus are sponsoring some part of this bill package. Thank you for the focus on helping small business succeed!
While we do appreciate these bills and believe they will help, we know that some of the problems of running a small business go deeper than this package. Affordability still remains a major concern for New Jersey businesses even if this bill package were to become law, and NJBIA wants to emphasize that more work on business costs and taxes needs to be done, regardless of the great work done today with these bills.
NJBIA thanks you all for the consideration of our perspective and urges this committee to vote “yes” on this small business bill package. Please let me know if you have any questions at cemigholz@njbia.org.
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