Idaho Statesman - Fewer Regulations are Needed for Growth, Businesses in Idaho Tell Lawmakers.

News Article

By Bill Roberts

Dustan Bristol, owner of Brick 29 restaurant in Nampa, recently laid off eight people.

Not, he said, because the business was doing poorly. It grossed $2 million last year.

But his unemployment-insurance tax bill more than doubled from late 2010 to 2011 as the state's jobless rate continued to mount. That and other factors forced him to cut his staff from 50 to 42, he said.

"I had to cut a couple of shifts," Bristol told a panel of lawmakers led by U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho. Labrador convened the daylong meeting Wednesday at the Idaho Statehouse to hear from businesses about how they are being affected by regulations.

Restaurants operate on a slim margin. Bristol aims for 3 percent, so when his unemployment tax bill rose from $2,100 in the fourth quarter of 2010 to $5,000 in the first quarter of 2011, Bristol said he had to make cuts. He's also put expansion plans on hold.

Bristol was among several business people in Idaho, representing timber, mining, food, car sales, manufacturing and other sectors, who spoke to Labrador and the members of the Legislative Business Caucus about how regulations are hampering hiring, driving up costs and hurting growth.

Labrador and the caucus, chaired by state Sen. Chuck Winder, R-Boise, said the intent was to hear from businesses and to draft an action plan for ways government can help businesses.

They got an earful.

Kent Watson, vice president and general manager of Thompson Creek Mining Co. in Clayton, said it took his company 10 months to get a notice regarding initial steps for a mine expansion published in the Federal Register. The notice went from "desk to desk to desk," Watson said.

Delays like that can lead to companies' not keeping people employed, either because of layoffs or because people leave, said Watson, whose company mines molybdenum, an additive to steel.

Such delays are "just outrageous," Labrador said.

Labrador said he wants to work on ways to expedite getting information in the Federal Register, a legal-notices publication for the federal government.

Bureaucratic delays were a common theme among businesses that spoke.

"One of the key things I've heard is: It's not the environmental laws that are the problem, it's the enforcement and the time frame to get through the process," Winder said.

But not all the complaints were about delays.

Chuck Everett, vice president of operations for Ameritel Inns, said federal regulations threaten to destabilize his seasonal workforce, particularly in a couple of hotels the company has in the resort community of Coeur d'Alene.

Everett uses the H-2B visa program to import about 20 foreign workers for the two hotels for the summer season, where many of them are employed in housekeeping.

He contracts with an agency for the employees in March. A U.S. Labor Department rule scheduled to take effect next year, however, would require that he continue trying to hire Americans for up to three days before the foreign workers start their jobs.

Everett says he can't do both. "I can't get American workers," he said. And even if he does, they may leave after a few weeks, while the foreign workers tend to stay for the season.

"It doesn't work," he said. "You are putting the cart before the horse."

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