My pet political issue: Jobs

OK, I'll go first. My number one political issue is job creation. If you combine unemployed, not looking anymore, and under employed, our unemployment rate is huge and unacceptable. Most of the problem is the fault of the federal government but those issues fall outside the responsibility of our local representatives in Richmond. At the state level we are mainly dealing with competition from other states so my concerns relate to making Virginia as attractive as possible to current and prospective employers. First I am concerned that anti-diversity stances taken by our leading politicians cast us as a backwards, unfriendly, and unstable place to do business. I believe that enthusiastic support for education at all levels, particularly aggressive vocational education, is necessary to provide a well trained employee base. I think existing Virginia employers should be recognized as the economic assets that they are and should receive tax credits for employing Virginia residents. People with jobs spend money with our businesses and pay taxes. To me, job creation is at the top of the important political issues list. WL

We need to decide what we're about

The time has come for the Valley Small Business Alliance to develop a clear small business related posture with respect to our elected representatives. Simply put we must decide what we want from our representatives and then we must deliver the message in a meaningful way. This process is difficult because it involves politics and we all have strong opinions and our own personal “hot buttons”. I have a few close friends I will discuss politics with and that's as far as it goes. Our Alliance will lose any potential effectiveness if we allow ourselves to enter into partisan political debates.

That being said, I would like to propose a few ground rules that might be helpful in developing our positions with respect to various issues that may arise.

First, regardless of political affiliation, we are all business owners and have staked our futures on the success of our ventures and I believe we are all essentially in agreement on business related challenges and we need to stress our similarities as we continue our policy development.

In our communications with our representatives I think we can assume that any elected representative, particularly those who would attend our meetings, are genuinely interested and supportive of the business community and want to help.

We can all read the newspaper and we all know what is going on in Richmond and Washington and how partisan politics and posturing cloud the issues and impede progress. I don't think we need “updates” from representatives but rather we need to communicate to them what we want and why we want it. I think if we do a credible job at delivering our message, the representatives will appreciate it and will learn from it.

There is strength in numbers. We need to understand that a balanced message delivered by a non partisan group will have more validity than politically motivated communication.

We need to pick our battles well so I would suggest we stick to issues on which we can reach consensus and there are a lot of them. We can leave the politically charged “hot potatoes” to others. We also must recognize that state legislators don't have a lot of control over federal subsidies.

These are simply my thoughts and they are no more right or wrong than yours. I am just trying to get a discussion started. I would think a good place to start would be to develop a list of issues we want to address. Please let the group know what issues are important to your business. Let's learn from each other. I challenge each of you to submit one issue you think should be addressed. WL