Small Business

After a seven-year delay, Randallstown residents cheered Monday over an announcement that a Walmart will open on Liberty Road next year. Officials and residents have long hoped that the store — a planned $9 million, 160,000-square-foot supercenter with groceries and a pharmacy — would revitalize the aging commercial corridor, encouraging other national retailers and restaurants to set up shop in the affluent, largely black community....

Tracy Balazs, the president and CEO of an Annapolis-based staffing firm, was named Entrepreneurial Success of the Year last month by the Baltimore district office of the U.S. Small Business Administration. She founded the company, Federal Staffing Resources LLC, in 2004. It now employs more than 300 people, has eight offices across the country and generates more than $30 million in revenue annually. The company mainly provides health professionals to government outfits, including the Army, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Federal Aviation Administration, though FSR recently expanded its operations to the staffing of private companies.

My Small Business Saturday got off to an early start on Wednesday.    At noon I picked up our Thanksgiving pumpkin pies and snowflake rolls at the re-located Roland Park Bakery and Deli . No longer at the back of the historic Roland Avenue shopping center, it is now on Chestnut Avenue, below The Avenue (West 36th Street) in Hampden. When I walked in almost all of the tables were full. A woman I know from Stevenson was there with her five grandchildren. Neighbors from Goodwood Gardens showed up shortly thereafter, so it seems that many of Anita Ward's longtime customers have followed her and her delicious baked goods to the new location.

The U.S. Senate recently passed a bill that would allow states to require Internet retailers to collect sales taxes on behalf of local governments. This bill has flaws, but they could be fixed in the House. It should be passed. I don't like the idea of the state and local governments collecting more taxes - they know no limits to their capacity to tax and squander our hard-earned dollars - but the current situation is unfair and bad economic policy. (Also, Marylanders stand to gain from this legislation in another way, because of a state law that will reduce future increases in gasoline taxes if taxing Internet sales is allowed.)

America needs the reforms included in the president's health care reform act, and Congress should stop attempting to repeal the law. As a small business owner who supplies health insurance to his employees, I understand how important a good group insurance market is. My Maryland based company has been in business for just over eight years, and our premiums have more than doubled during this time. However, after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, our premiums actually declined in 2010.

As a small business owner, I take great umbrage at the idea that government helps small business ("Government helps small business? Absolutely," July 20). Yes, government does everything your letter writer says, but we taxpayers are the ones who pay the bill. Small businesses are the engine that drives the economy, not government. Government does not create, it only takes. I do not know where the letter writer gets his information, but it sounds like it's straight from the Democratic Party talking points.

Contrary to what a recent letter writer may think ("Internet sales tax will hurt small businesses," Nov. 18), collection of state sales taxes on online retail transactions will be a boon to small businesses in Maryland. Small businesses currently face unfair and detrimental competition from online-only retailers who exploit the loophole in our nation's sales tax laws to avoid collecting and remitting state sales taxes. The current legislation - the Marketplace Fairness Act and the Marketplace Equity Act - before Congress is designed to eliminate the 6 percent price disadvantage and level the playing field for small, in-state businesses.

It was only a matter of time before Gov. Martin O' Malley and his groupies pushed another tax burden upon us ("House approves increase in gas tax," March 23). House Majority leader Kumar Barve estimates that this increase will cost motorists $10.10 a month, based on the example of someone who drives 15,000 miles a year in a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon. That may be the case in his world, but unfortunately not mine. My small business requires a truck that at best gets 13.5 miles to the gallon and an annual mileage exceeding 50,000 miles a year.

President Barack Obama said over the weekend at a Virginia campaign speech that private businesses are successful largely because of the government's support. This statement is absolutely ridiculous. It's pretty clear that President Obama has never owned a business. I am a small business owner, and I took a major risk starting my company three years ago. I didn't rely on any bank loans, as I financed the start-up costs on my own. It required a tremendous amount of personal sacrifice, hard work and sleepless nights to get my business off the ground.

As the economy continues to struggle and America tries to reclaim its place in the global economic and financial markets, small business once again is left holding the proverbial bag. As attorney and author Steve Strauss asked in his Aug. 8 column in USA Today, how do we pump the entrepreneurial well even deeper in the face of so much legislative, political, and global red tape? With unemployment constantly hovering around 9 percent and fear grasping every American from Main Street to Wall Street, how does the small business owner stand a chance of survival, let alone the ability to grow and prosper?

When I bought Marlin Steel in 1998, the extent of its technology was an old fax machine. Today, our factory is full of industrial robots that are fed computer-aided designs and churn out steel containers for industry 60 times faster than before. We're winning jobs that used to go to China and elsewhere. My employees, who once made $6 an hour, average $26 an hour now. This isn't your grandfather's small factory: We depend on the Internet, cloud computing and other new technologies, just like thousands of other manufacturers our size.

Laurel has undergone many changes since the 1980s, but one thing has remained consistent over the years: the Laurel Board of Trade's annual Main Street Festival. This year's Main Street Festival, the 33rd one overall, will be held on Saturday, May 11, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Main Street will be closed to traffic between southbound Route 1 and Seventh Street for the festival, which could attract upward of 100,000 people. The festival usually hosts about 300 vendors and service organizations are spread out along the street, said Janet Able, treasurer of the Laurel Board of Trade.

Small businesses would be protected from the type of fraud allegedly committed by Harford County payroll firm AccuPay Inc. under legislation being proposed by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski. The Maryland Democrat plans to introduce a bill that would require payroll service providers to register with the Internal Revenue Service and be either bonded or certified by the tax agency. It also would set federal penalties for payroll firms that fail to send clients' tax payments to the government.

The Great Gourmet is Kimberly Scott's way of introducing the world to Maryland seafood. Her Eastern Shore company sells crab cakes, oysters and clams to wholesale and retail markets. In 2006, just three years after opening, The Great Gourmet was logging $1.8 million in revenue. Three years after that, Scott had revenue of $3.8 million, 15 employees and a place on Inc. Magazine's 500/5000 fastest-growing companies list. With her company expanding, Scott turned to Richard Loeffler at the Eastern Region Small Business and Technology Development Center at Salisbury University in 2009 for advice about a small-business loan that would allow her to move from rented space to a building of her own in Federalsburg with more freezer space.

Just when you thought Annapolis had run out of new ways to tax us, now we're all going to be hit again with the accurately named "rain tax" ("Anger grows over stormwater fees," April 16). Of course, the editors of The Sun think this is just wonderful and sorely needed to pay for all the new storm drains, collection ponds, stream restorations and so on mandated the E.P.A. Funny though, how it was only a couple of years ago that we were told the major cause of pollution in the bay was manure from chicken farms and agricultural run-off on the Eastern Shore.

Sen. Ben Cardin lamented snowballing damage from federal budget cuts in town hall meetings with federal workers and small-business leaders Friday, pledging to work toward an alternative budget solution by October. But he acknowledged that achieving a compromise between similar budget proposals from the Senate and President Barack Obama and another from the House of Representatives could be a challenge. He spoke to two dozen Howard County business owners and more than 50 employees at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

There are so many made-up days of celebration or awareness - National Mayonnaise Day or Annual Broccoli Week - that I don't even pay attention to them anymore. But something caught my eye when the BBB of Greater Maryland sent out a release on Small Business Saturday on Nov. 26 th . If you have an American Express card and use it to spend $25 or more at a small business on that Saturday, the credit card company will credit your account with $25 later. The company's generosity only goes so far. The offer is good for the first 200,000 cards registered.

It was only a matter of time before Gov. Martin O' Malley and his groupies pushed another tax burden upon us ("House approves increase in gas tax," March 23). House Majority leader Kumar Barve estimates that this increase will cost motorists $10.10 a month, based on the example of someone who drives 15,000 miles a year in a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon. That may be the case in his world, but unfortunately not mine. My small business requires a truck that at best gets 13.5 miles to the gallon and an annual mileage exceeding 50,000 miles a year.

Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski urged the Internal Revenue Service to quickly investigate the potential fraud at a Harford County payroll company and called for the agency to protect "honest small businesses" that might have had their payroll tax payments misdirected or delayed. Police in Bel Air, where the company is based, are investigating whether AccuPay Inc. stole years of tax payments rather than sending them to tax collectors on behalf of clients. The company, with an estimated 500 to 600 clients, shut down last week after a Bel Air veterinary hospital filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that the company "repeatedly and regularly" failed to pay or made only partial payments of federal and state withholding and unemployment taxes over the past five years.