Chamber veteran Suzanne Clark, currently President of the National Journal Group, led a group of current Chamber experts in a discussion of legislative priorities for our small business owners. On the panel were Carol Hallett, Randy Johnson, and Bill Kovacs talking about infrastructure, labor, and the environment respectively. Suzanne gave them each three minutes to open.

Randy Johnson noted Steven Law's presentation on the Employee Free Choice Act yesterday, but wanted to add that small businesses are the ones most vulnerable to card check and they should do what most of the already do, talk to their employees and explain their business, the costs, and why they make the decisions they make. Education is the best defense against intimidation.

Moving on he mentioned the Healthy Families Act which, like EFCA, is noble in title but has quite a few devils in the details. There are also potentially costly ergonomics and employee definition proposals floating around. All in all, Johnson thinks that there is a feeling on the Hill that small business has been exempt for to long from many workplace regulations and that they needed to be pulled in. Needless to say this would be costly, and he encouraged the small business owners present to make sure that their side of the story was told.

Carol Hallett pointed out that without a strong infrastructure to move goods and information none of our businesses would have a chance to succeed. She talked about the importance of the Let's Rebuild America initiative and how unlike many issues which pop up and then fade away infrastructure problems are a marathon, not a sprint. The Not In My Backyard folks are a huge drain on building infrastructure, killing projects outright and driving up the costs of others. The biggest hurdle though is funding and no matter if done by public-private partnerships or public dollars alone the cost will hurt, but the pain of doing nothing will be much greater.

On energy Bill Kovacs talked about the need to actually have a plan in place to replace the energy which cap-and-trade would take out of the system. We need to streamline the regulatory process, and eliminate the legal and regulatory barriers to actually building energy generation. Kovacs mentioned the ProjectNoProject site, and how in talking with a representative from another industry learned that NIMBY's aren't just a problem with infrastructure and energy; there are over 500 mobile phone towers currently being challenged by NIMBY groups. Also talked about was the memo discovered today talking about the significant cost of regulating CO2.

Clark asked the group how small business owners could make a difference. Hallett encouraged everyone to join their local Chamber, Kovacs said to make sure and visit your representatives when they are home on recess. Randy Johnson then made an excellent point. Business owners are often shy about talking about an issue unless they feel they completely understand it and can make positive suggestions, they like to solve problems. He told them that the issues are big and complicated and that there was a good chance their representative didn't fully understand them. Businesses should just go in and tell their story to help educate on the real world consequences of Beltway decisions.

Perhaps the best line was delivered by Hallett, noting that small businesses are their own best advocates she said, "If you don't find the time to participate, you might find that you end up with all the time in the world when a bad policy decision causes you to lose your business." With that, everyone seemed anxious to head up to Capitol Hill.