Central Vermont business leaders air concerns with Rep. Welch
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By Peter Hirschfeld Vermont Press Bureau - Published: February 9, 2010
BERLIN – David Zahn is doing his damnedest to be a good businessman.
In 2008, Zahn's Montpelier-based Web-development company undertook a yearlong cost-cutting initiative that slashed major overhead expenses by more than half.
"My guys worked for almost an entire year making the changes to our infrastructure, which essentially involved migrating out of the physical data center and into the cloud," said Zahn, co-founder of Signal Advertising.
The move, Zahn said, was designed to put the nine-employee company on sounder financial footing. And it succeeded. Until, he said at a business roundtable hosted by Rep. Peter Welch Monday, the new health-insurance premiums arrived.
"It just wiped out everything we'd worked so hard to save," Zahn told Welch. "We're knocking ourselves out to be efficient, to be frugal Vermonters, to be technically smart and use all the ways we can to save money. And in one fell swoop it gets eaten up."
Zahn was among the dozen or so central Vermont business leaders who gave Vermont's lone congressman a sense of the challenges faced by area employers. Health-insurance reform, federal tax incentives and readier access to investment capital, they said Monday, will propel area businesses out of the recession and improve employment prospects for out-of-work Vermonters.
"Whatever economists say about the recession being over – I don't regard it as over until people are back to work," Welch said. "We've got some very significant challenges, and I think there's a lot of things we can do if we encourage the local economy."
While defending his support for the $750 billion bailout of the U.S. banking system, Welch says the federal government must now direct its resources toward small businesses. The Wall Street-versus-Main Street mantra has become a familiar theme on Welch's four-stop "Business Roundtable on the Economy" tour. Recent conversations with business people from sectors across the local economy, he said, will help shape new federal policies aimed at widespread financial recovery.
"Whatever's happened on Wall Street, on Main Street, we still face really significant challenges," Welch told business leaders gathered at the Central Vermont Chamber of Commerce in Berlin. "When people aren't spending, you're not selling. And people aren't going to be spending until we get ... unemployment back down."
Executives from businesses large and small said Monday that federal tax incentives are one surefire way to stimulate jobs and grow businesses. Federal investments, in energy especially, they said, will spark a local-economy boom that would benefit everyone from high-tech manufacturers to the laborers hired to install the equipment.
Access to capital will also help small businesses, according to Steve Gurin, regional vice president for Community National Bank. Demand for loans in his office, Gurin said, is higher than he's seen in five years. But his bank, he said, is currently unable to meet the demand.
"We have clients who need short-term working capital," Gurin said. "And it's hard to get it to them."
Welch says he's pushing bills that would support many of the goals that business people are advocating for. One piece of proposed legislation, Welch said, would spark the green economy by pouring billions of federal dollars into efficiency retrofits. Another bill, he said, would use $30 billion of unused "troubled asset relief" or TARP money to provide more capital for small-business loans.
Welch will hold a press event on Tuesday to outline his new "small business agenda," a platform informed largely, he said, by his talks with executives from around Vermont.
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