NFIB California Main Street Minute

Date: January 04, 2021

For the legislative and political week January 4-8

Happy New Year. Welcome to the January 4 edition of the NFIB California Main Street Minute from your small-business advocacy team in Sacramento. Thank you for your membership with NFIB this past year – we look forward to being your indispensable small business resource and advocate once again in 2021 and beyond. With this edition, the Main Street Minute will resume weekly publication. Look for your next MSM on January 11.

  • This was to have been the day the Legislature returned for business, but that has been pushed back to next week, January 11. No word yet as to whether the start date will be extended again.
  • Hurry, if you’re interested. Last Wednesday, December 30, the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) announced the opening of a state grant application period for small businesses and nonprofits. “This first round of applications ends January 8, 2021, at 11:59 p.m. Details for the second round will be announced shortly,” said a news release issued by GO-Biz. More details can be found in the release. UPDATE: GO-Biz later sent a tweet announcing the deadline to apply had been extended to January 13 at 11:59 p.m.
  • Speaking of grants. NFIB California State Director John Kabateck has sent a letter of support to a bipartisan group of legislators pushing for passage of the Keep California Working Act (Senate Bill 74). The measure would invest $2.6 billion in grants to help small businesses and non-profits that have sustained financial losses. Click here for a fact sheet about SB 74 and here to read the bill itself.
  • We now have company. A little more than a week after NFIB, the National Retail Federation, and a few NFIB-member California small-business owners filed their lawsuit challenging Cal/OSHA’s overreach in its latest Emergency Temporary Standards, a coalition including the Western Growers, California Farm Bureau, and the California Business Roundtable, has filed its own lawsuit.
  • “The Board imposed unrealistic, unfounded and economically harmful standards … We have no choice but to seek judicial relief,” said Dave Puglia, president and CEO of Western Growers in a news release issued by his organization. Where’s the science? snapped Christopher Valadez, president of the Grower-Shipper Association of Central California. “As this pandemic has shown us over the last several months, it is imperative that science and data drive policy. That is at the core of what we seek in this lawsuit.”
  • Click here to go right to the lawsuit, and here to see NFIB’s story on its lawsuit, which contains all necessary links.
  • Speaking of Kabateck, he will be part of a panel discussion about what small businesses need to reopen, survive, and grow at a “Reopen Cal Now” policy conference in Rancho Murieta (Sacramento County), January 8-10. Sacramento-area NFIB members should have received an email with more details and a registration link. Attendees may participate either in-person or online. If you have not and are interested in attending, get in touch with NFIB California Grassroots Manager Taylor Criddle, [email protected]
  • Media-wise, it was another big year for NFIB California, and the applause goes to our great NFIB California members who were there to answer the calls of reporters and refine and inform the interviews with State Director John Kabateck so we are able to spread the small-business message far and wide. We invite you to take a scroll down Media Lane at this story, NFIB California in the News 2019-2020.
  • We’re off to a fast media start in 2021. Kabateck tells Good Day Sacramento that Gov. Gavin Newsom is dead wrong on the minimum-wage issue, calling the state’s new increase in payroll costs a “death blow” for many struggling small businesses.

Nationally

  • This Wednesday, January 6, NFIB kicks off another year of webinars aimed at helping members navigate the federal loan process. Join hosts Holly Wade, executive director of the NFIB Research Center, and Elizabeth Milito, executive director of NFIB’s Legal Foundation for the ‘What you need to know on applying for a second (or initial) PPP loan’ webinar at 9 a.m. Pacific, Noon Eastern. Register here.
  • This Thursday, January 7, NFIB will release its monthly Jobs Report
  • Next Tuesday, January 12, NFIB will come out with its monthly Small Business Economic Trends report, also known as the Optimism Index.
  • Together with the quadrennial Small Business Problems & Priorities study, the latest released this past summer, the Optimism Index and Jobs Report are the loadstar trio of NFIB research vehicles.
  • There is now a fourth, however, and we someday look forward to saying farewell to it: our special Small Business Surveys of the membership as to how they’re coping with the COVID-19 crisis, especially with the federal loan process. In the meantime, it has been a welcome treasure trove of information for members and the media.
  • All the Small Business Surveys conducted since March of last year can be found in one place on the right-hand side. They all begin with questions on PPP and EIDL loans, but you will find different questions on everything from masks to COVID infections in the workplace in the later questions.

Finally, will this year kick off a new Roaring 20s? Is it time to start practicing your Charleston and jitterbug dance moves? From The Economist, “Warren Harding built a campaign for the presidential election in 1920 around his new word ‘normalcy.’ It was an appeal to Americans’ supposed urge to forget the horrors of the first world war and the Spanish flu and turn back to the certainties of the Golden Age. And yet, instead of embracing Harding’s normalcy, the Roaring Twenties became a ferment of forward-looking, risk-taking social, industrial and artistic novelty. War had something to do with the Jazz Age’s lack of inhibition. So did the flu pandemic, which killed six times as many Americans and left survivors with an appetite to live the 1920s at speed. That spirit will also animate the 2020s.”

Photo courtesy of Sergeant at Arms California State Assembly webpage. https://sergeant.assembly.ca.gov/assemblychambers

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