Legislative Agenda

Agenda PDF

The 2011 session was generally a positive one for the state’s business community. By controlling spending and avoiding new business taxes, New York has set the stage for restoring its economic competitiveness.

In 2012, The Business Council’s legislative agenda focuses on maintaining and building on the state’s fiscal discipline, improving the state’s overall business climate and reducing state-imposed business costs and barriers to new investment and job growth. Our agenda for the upcoming legislative session will focus on:

  • Imposing limits on new spending growth, and adopting additional fiscal reforms including a new pension tier
  • Rejecting new or increased business taxes, fees and assessments in the state budget
  • Instituting real mandate relief for localities to allow them to manage their own spending levels under the real property tax cap
  • Reforming the state’s SEQRA, permitting and other programs to provide predictable, workable time frames for the approval of new investment projects
  • Finalizing regulations to allow for the safe and timely development of the Marcellus Shale
  • Adopting broad reforms in the state’s business taxes to reduce compliance costs and make the state’s tax code more supportive of in-state investment and job creation
  • Reforming the state’s rigorous, expensive regulatory climate to eliminate unnecessary and inefficient compliance mandates
  • Opposing new group health coverage mandates, which drive up employer and employee costs and make group health plans increasingly unaffordable
  • Reducing lawsuit costs, including adoption of long-needed reforms to the state’s so-called scaffolding law, and rejecting expansion of the state’s “Martin Act”
  • Promoting public-private partnerships and other procurement innovations such as design build to promote, and get the most out of, new investment in public infrastructure
  • Reforming education funding programs to incentivize improved outcomes in K-12 and higher education, to assure that New Yorkers can meet the skill needs of a technology-based economy
  • Supporting a constitutional amendment to allow casino gaming

We made great strides in 2011 by working together to improve the business climate in New York, and promoting private sector investment and job creation.

I look forward to partnering with Governor Cuomo, the Senate and Assembly and, most importantly, our members, for an even more successful – and job filled – 2012.

Heather C. Briccetti, Esq.
President and CEO
The Business Council of New York State, Inc.