Coast river business journal. (Astoria, OR) 2006-current, January 15, 2020, Page 2, Image 2

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    2 • JANUARY 2020
COAST RIVER BUSINESS JOURNAL
EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
Too many good intentions make
life complicated for small business
A
fter reading stories
about new state laws
taking effect this year
— see pages 12 and 13 — an
old observation came to mind
that no one is safe when the
legislature is in session.
This was cynical of me.
Lawmakers and agencies
mostly make a good-faith
effort to address genuine
problems faced by constitu-
ents. Seldom do they actively
conspire to make anyone’s
life worse.
Instead, as someone
responsible for making a pay-
roll and stewarding vital jour-
nalistic assets into the future,
it just seems to me that too
MATT
WINTERS
PUBLISHER
& EDITOR
many good intentions landing
all at once can jam things up.
Keeping a business alive for
yourself, your employees and
owners/shareholders requires
constant attention. Add on a
new pile of good intentions
generated in Olympia and
Salem, and you can be for-
given for wondering whether
their authors have ever had to
sweat through a month or a
season of hard times.
And yet I have no fun-
damental disagreement
with reforms like outlawing
overly restrictive non-com-
pete clauses in employment
contracts, or requiring rea-
sonable work adjustments
for pregnancy. Lawmak-
ers should, however, make a
better effort to examine the
totality of what they pass
each session to ensure that
business — especially small
business — isn’t paved over
by good intentions.
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My maternal grandfather’s
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On politics in general,
Twain said, “Whenever you
find yourself on the side of
the majority, it is time to
reform.” About Congress,
he observed, “There is no
distinctly native American
criminal class except
Congress.”
But Rogers has much
more to say that seems rele-
vant to our modern situation.
“This country has come
to feel the same when Con-
gress is in session as when
the baby gets hold of a ham-
mer,” Rogers said. The
same might be true of state
legislatures.
Mike Wallis, CPA
RYAN STANLEY, COORDINATOR
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www.clatsopworks.com
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