The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) Underground Injection Control (UIC) program is intended to manage the disposition of wastes into geologic repositories. Hydraulic fracturing is a well stimulation technology that has been used for more than 50 years over a million times. It has been regulated for decades by states and never posed an environmental risk. It is essential to the development of American natural gas and oil. There are no environmental benefits to additional federal regulation.
Elimination of sections 327 and 328 [of the Safe Water Drinking Act] would not make production of oil and natural gas in the United States any safer, but could substantially increase domestic oil and natural gas production costs, thereby decreasing domestic supply.
Testimony submitted to this hearing by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) proposes a series of changes to federal environmental law that taken together can only serve to cripple American oil and natural gas production without attendant environmental benefits....The Committee – and more broadly the Congress – should summarily reject NRDC’s proposals. They follow the tired path of alleging to the Congress the need to change laws and regulations that do not follow NRDC’s world view and where NRDC and its allied professional anti-development organizations have failed to change the regulatory program through the normal processes or by appealing to the court system. This collection of proposals will have one clear effect – less exploration and production of American oil and natural gas and more foreign dependency. This is hardly an energy policy that makes sense of America.
By paying workers who take extended time off from the job for almost any sort of family concern, this mandate would impose significant costs in the form of payments for replacement workers, including overtime. It would disrupt work schedules and leave difficult gaps in staffing for small and large companies…It's already hard enough to do business and provide jobs in New York state. Our leaders in Albany should not make it still harder.
This socialist diktat takes feel-good politics to a new level….the basic argument for this socialist propaganda is the necessity for Big Brother to subsidize an army of breastfeeding single mothers….Ultimately, the inevitable impact of the cost of the paid family leave measure will fall on the shoulders of the ever-diminishing minority in this state: those who build businesses and create the real jobs that sustain our economy. You know, the ones moving to Florida and other states with no state income tax and few of the ridiculous government regulations that make New Jersey the worst state in the nation for small business.
I’m scared that this provision will add a pretty significant cost. You’re going to see a lot of small guys just close up shop.
Most businesses would tell you that they presently take care of their employees. They don't need government telling them how to do it.
We want to take the message to the public and the San Francisco residents to let them know how close to the tipping point the restaurant industry is.
I can tell you that as of right now, we are not looking to expand in San Francisco. It’s a labor-intensive industry, and the last thing we need is to get dinged for it.
Where we are headed for, you are not going to see those cool, little local restaurants. You are going to see a bunch of corporate restaurants, and the rest of the city is going to look like the restaurant dynamic on Fisherman’s Wharf.
