Debate on the bills is scheduled to begin next month, but some business owners aren't waiting.
"I'm going up next week to Gettysburg to look at property," said Alex Aigner, chief financial officer for Germantown-based DataLab USA, which has roughly 35 employees. He said he has received a "ton of calls" from property agents and state officials in Pennsylvania and Virginia about relocating and referring to the tech tax as the impetus for the calls.
Linda Kaczmarek, president of Visual Data Systems in Columbia, said the tax would make her 23-employee Web-design firm noncompetitive and she has frozen hiring in Maryland. "In order to stay in business, we could not stay in Maryland," she said. "We have offices in North Carolina ... and what we would look at it is potentially reallocating out resources" there.
Lawmakers in Annapolis expressed concern yesterday about potential business migration.
"I think there's a real potential for very bad economic outcomes here," said Del. Murray D. Levy, a Democrat and fiscal expert from Charles County. "Will these companies move? They are highly mobile, and so I suspect a certain amount will."
Economic development officials in neighboring states are cautious about talking about their response to Maryland's tech tax, which does not exist in surrounding jurisdictions.
"We're not putting raids into Maryland ... because we don't want to have a border war," said Gary Smith, a senior official in the Delaware Economic Development Office.
Smith acknowledged, however, that the new tax "definitely presents an opportunity" for Delaware.
Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for Pennsylvania's economic development agency, said a recent marketing trip to Maryland by agency officials was "coincidental" with uproar over the tech tax. "The issue at these meetings did come up, but our folks did not go down there specifically to look at engaging a specific sector," he said.
Maryland officials said they were less worried about poaching from other states than about home-grown discontent among business owners.
"As for other states marketing within our boundaries, that's not as big a concern as business decisions that will get made as a result" of the tax, said Edgerley, the economic development chief.
He said uncertainty about how the tax will be regulated and about pending legislation is contributing to unease within the business community and making his job more difficult. But he expressed confidence that Maryland would remain an attractive business address for computer companies regardless of the repeal effort.
