>>>>> NY’s Main Street businesses need unemployment insurance fix now (Your Letters) – syracuse.com

For the last four years, New York’s small businesses have been shouldering the burden of the Empire State’s pandemic-related Unemployment Insurance (UI) debt with no help or relief from Albany. As we all remember at the beginning of the pandemic, businesses, including small businesses owned by our neighbors and friends, were ordered to shut down operations for weeks or months on end. Even when small businesses could reopen, there were significant restrictions in place limiting their ability to rebound and maintain profitability. But Main Street complied with government orders and took on substantial debt to simply stay afloat. Meanwhile, New York state borrowed nearly $13 billion from the federal government to pay the surge in UI claims. Fast forward to 2025, and New York still owes more than $6 billion to the federal government.

Let’s be clear, the state is not paying off its debt; every business in New York, including Main Street businesses, is paying it off through the highest possible state UI taxes, special assessments and higher federal UI taxes. The average small business is paying an extra $400 per employee per year because of the UI debt, and all because they followed the rules imposed by New York state. Small business owners have been calling on Albany to pay off the debt, restore the UI trust fund’s solvency, and provide much-needed relief to Main Street, and those calls have been answered.

The Assembly has risen to the occasion and should be celebrated for their practical and reasonable solution to pay off the state’s debt and begin restoring the UI trust fund. Their plan will save small businesses thousands of dollars every year and follows more than 35 other states that used federal pandemic funds to restore their UI systems.

While the state’s UI crisis should have been dealt with years ago when New York’s coffers were overflowing with money from Washington, D.C., now is the time to do it. The Empire State simply cannot afford to continue to kick this can down the road. No one knows what the economy will look like in the future, and a recession would send the state back into UI borrowing mode. Small businesses cannot afford a decade or more of high UI taxes; it is unsustainable and will have an irreversible impact on Main Street.

Small businesses are the heartbeat of this state, creating nearly half of New York’s jobs, keeping the lights on in our neighborhood storefronts, paying taxes, and contributing to community and civic organizations. New York’s economy has been struggling post pandemic, we are losing small businesses, and our state is the worst for starting a new business — in part, because of unnecessarily high UI taxes. They cannot continue to go unaddressed. As the final state budget is negotiated, the Assembly’s commonsense UI proposal must be included. Main Street depends on it.

Ashley Ranslow

NFIB is a statewide organization representing more than 11,000 small, independently owned businesses.