With two full-time lobbyists on staff, the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce will be closely watching the State House this year, said President and CEO John Gregory. But the Chamber also will be making internal improvements, including pushing for increased professional development by almost doubling its offered seminars, running one about every week and a half.
Gregory spoke with Providence Business News about what 2008 will bring for northern Rhode Island business.
PBN: What issues will be important during 2008?
GREGORY: Obviously, I think the biggest thing for all of us this year, from an advocacy standpoint, is to sort of keep an eye on what’s happening at the State House as it relates to the budget. It’s no secret that in almost any survey that comes out, [northern Rhode Island businesses] don’t do well from a business-climate prospective.
PBN: How are the Chamber’s goals and strategy different from last year?
GREGORY: The major difference, if I were to look at it, is we’ve worked real hard with others in taking a look at the budget. … A non-legislative but certainly a local issue is, we would like to see more people get involved in elections in 2008.
Last year was an off year, although we did have local elections in Central Falls and Woonsocket. So [one goal is] to get people to get out to vote and to volunteer for the election process, get involved with a candidate’s campaign.
Our online forum is going to be something new for us, giving our candidates, on the state and local level, a chance to answer questions.
PBN: What issues have your members had to deal with that other regions might not?
GREGORY: When you get into some of the localized issues, we had a disappointment in North Smithfield this past year when the town council, in an attempt to rectify what they saw as changing property values between residential and commercial, decided to go to a two-tier tax system. That’s not unique, they’re not the only community doing it, but we feel that in any of our communities a two-tier tax system isn’t the way to attract or keep business.
We did have what I would consider a significant win in Lincoln, where there was an attempt to pass a local ordinance relating to illegal immigrants that would have put the burden of proof – and potentially financially – on businesses. The town could actually shut the business down if they had an illegal immigrant on their staff and didn’t take the time to verify that person’s status. We were able to see that particular ordinance defeated.
PBN: What Chamber programs will change this year?
GREGORY: Under economic development, in the short term, we’re really going to get more aggressive putting on seminars this year. We’re going to put on at least 30 seminars.
PBN: How many do you put on during a normal year?
GREGORY: Last year, we probably put on 16 or 18. We’ve found that our two most popular – and we’re already seeing the same for 2008 – are Excel and QuickBooks. We work with folks from the [R.I.] Small Business Development Center and we have a couple of independent contractors with which we work.
And I think what we’re looking at, what we sense during 2008, is that the economy isn’t going to be as strong as it may have been before the last quarter of 2007, which means they’re really going to have to focus on running their business more. So we’re saying, “You know what, instead of you going out and doing research and trying to get someone in to teach you staff Excel or QuickBooks, we’ll do the research, we’ll charge a favorable price.” And that’s part of the value of belonging to the Chamber of Commerce.
PBN: How many Chamber members are there?
GREGORY: We have a little over 900.
PBN: How has that changed during the past year?
GREGORY: It went down – 2007 was, for us, somewhat of a challenging year.
We, as other Chambers in the state, have a worker’s comp discount program – a safety group – working with The Beacon Mutual Insurance Co. Of course, with the challenges they had last year, it was decided that they had to suspend the group. So we had a certain element of our membership that had joined us just to access the discount on worker’s comp. When the discount went away, they went away.
PBN: How much of your population was that?
GREGORY: That was probably about 100 members. •
