Pity poor Twitter. After recently raising $200 million on a $3.7 billion valuation, it doesn’t want to cough up a city payroll tax. So the company is on its way to winning a $22 million tax break from struggling San Francisco after threatening to leave its city digs for the ‘burbs. The exemption on the tax—which levies a 1.5 percent charge on worker compensation—is about to be granted for new employees hired the next six years at larger companies in a specific downtown area. It’s clearly aimed at Twitter which could hire as many as 2,000 workers in that time. Twitter had hoped for a total exemption on all workers, not just newbies, for eight years. Supporters say the move, which will likely be finalized next week, is an incentive to keep firms in a city running out of money and slashing services.
“The bottom line is, if we don’t do this we will not have their payroll to tax. Companies will leave,” a city supervisor tells the San Francisco Chronicle. Critics characterize it as corporate welfare and a form of extortion. “If
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In a rerun of a failed 2010 measure, HB 3349 – Buy America got a hearing in the House Business and Labor Committee, but lack of support precluded a vote on the bill.
The summary for HB 3349 reads Prohibits contracting agency (e.g., government) from awarding contract for public improvement or public works unless iron, steel, wood products and manufactured goods, including equipment, used in public improvement or public works are produced within the United States. Specifies exceptions. The term public improvement or public works is interpreted to mean any construction. The term iron, steel, wood products and manufactured goods, including equipment seems to include, other than minerals (e.g. stone) anything non-supernatural.
Both private (including AOI) and public sector representatives have discussed the difficulties presented by this and related bills. The requirements imposed by these measures will impose further burdens on all contractors and especially smaller contracting agencies that have few, if any, fulltime public contracting professionals, and create confusion among bidders and manufacturers. I
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BP is in talks with the Interior Department about permits that would allow it to resume deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, according to two sources familiar with the discussions. The company hopes that it can restart several projects sometime this summer.
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The discussions come just before the anniversary of the April 2 blowout on the Deepwater Horizon rig that BP leased for an exploration well called Macondo. The blowout killed 11 workers, set the rig on fire and triggereda huge oil spill that gushed for 87 days.
BP hopes to ultimately obtain permission to begin drilling about 1 wells to boost output in fields that are already producing oil; none of them would be an exploration well, one of the sources said. No work would be done in the near future on the field discovered by the Macondo well.
Discussions with Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) about other BP wells are still underway, focusing on BP’s safety program. Melis
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A Russian billionaire has bought what the Wall Street Journal calls the nation’s most expensive single-family home. Investor Yuri Milner paid $100 million for the Silicon Valley estate in Los Altos Hills. It’s 25,500 square feet, with both an indoor and outdoor pool, a ballroom, a tennis court, etc. Milner has no plans to move from Moscow anytime soon, making it a quaint second home for him.
The sale highlights a split in the real estate market, notes the Journal: Year-over-year sales of homes in the mere mortal range of $100,000 to $250,000 were down 8% in February, but sales of those worth more than $1 million were up 4%. “The crummy real estate market is not in the high end,” says one agent.
Like the retail behemoth at its center, everything about the Supreme Court extravaganza known as Wal-Mart v. Dukes is super-sized.
The number of women who could be included in the sex discrimination class-action suit is measured in millions. The amount of damages for which the nation’s largest private employer could be liable is estimated in billions.
If the Supreme Court agrees the case can move forward, it would be the largest employment discrimination class-action suit in U.S. history. As Wal-Mart likes to point out, the suit could include more people than the number now serving in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard combined. Oral arguments are scheduled for Tuesday.
The prospect of such a massive lawsuit — or, alternatively, a ruling that hobbles workers from mounting class-action suits against large, national employers — has drawn an outpouring of competing briefs from corporate America and the nation’s leading civil rights groups.
The suit, filed by six female Wal-Mart employees in 21, will also spotlight two intriguing story lines about the Supreme Court.
One is the perception, reinforced by President Obama, congressional Democrats and civil rights groups, that the court is overly protective of the corporate world. There i
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