Electric vehicles could be facing new fee in Texas
The first electric vehicles built at the Tesla plant under construction in southeastern Travis County are expected to start rolling off the factory floor late next year — just in time for Texans who buy them to get saddled with a $200 annual fee from the state if a proposed new law wins approval.
The idea for the fee has been prompted by concerns that revenue from gasoline taxes will drop if electric vehicles made by Tesla and other manufacturers become more popular.
A major portion of the 38.4-cents-pergallon state and federal gas tax collected
again in the next few weeks,” said Reynolds, whose studios are in North Carolina and Utah.
America’s entrepreneurs welcomed Congress’ long-delayed relief package, which provides $325 billion in aid to small companies and makes it easier for them to gain access to grants and loans under its renewed Paycheck Protection Program.
However, the rescue comes too late for tens of thousands of businesses that already have closed or may have to soon, a consequence of a pandemic that has kept away diners, shoppers and customers since early spring.
The National Restaurant Association, for example, estimates 110,000 U.S. restaurants — 17 percent — have shut down indefinitely or for good, doomed by restrictions on their hours or capacity and by Americans’ reluctance to eat out.
“If you closed already, it doesn’t help you a bit,” said Henry Pertman, director of operations at Total Image Creative, a Marylandbased hospitality consulting firm. “We lost a lot of restaurants that didn’t have to go under. They saw no light at the end of the tunnel.”
It’s a fear that weighs heavily on one restaurateur, Amy Sidhom.
She isn’t convinced the new federal aid will be enough to significantly help her or the 21 workers she furloughed heading into the holiday season. The surging pandemic has dealt a devastating blow to her restaurant, Crumbs, in Danville, Calif., about 30 miles east of San Francisco
After she’d spent about $35,000 to set up for outdoor dining, Crumbs’ sales finally had returned to their prepandemic levels, enabling the 2-year-old restaurant to recall its entire staff of 25. But the comeback was short-lived.
After outdoor dining was banned through most of California earlier this month, Crumbs was forced to return to takeout only.
Sales have plunged 85 percent to 90 percent in recent weeks. Crumbs now has only four employees.
As a stark reminder of the pandemic’s economic toll, Sidhom has set up in front of Crumbs’ now-empty outdoor seating area a row of empty chairs bearing the names and sad stories of the employees who have lost their jobs.
“We are kind of day-by-day now,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like there is an end in sight, and it doesn’t seem like there is empathy toward small businesses, particularly restaurants. So, no, I am not optimistic.”
Many small and independent retailers are in jeopardy, too. They typically collect an outsize proportion of their annual revenue
during the holiday shopping season.
However, government restrictions are limiting how many customers can be in a store at one time. Even apart from such restrictions, many consumers are staying home anyway as a precaution against the resurgent virus.
Especially vulnerable are small, independent shops, many of which are barely hanging on and likely will close their doors after the holidays — joining more than 8,600 retailers that already have gone out of business this year, according to market researcher CoreSight.
For them, Congress took too long and probably offered too little relief on top of a $2 trillion rescue package the government enacted in March but whose benefits had largely expired.
That aid package introduced PPP loans, which are meant to
help small businesses keep employees on their payrolls.
“We really needed this second round and renewal of the program back in August to help many businesses to get through the last quarter of 2020,” said Karen Kerrigan, president of the advocacy group Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council.
Reynolds, the fitness studio owner, is hoping for government help to tide his fitness company over until a coronavirus vaccine becomes widely available and customers feel comfortable enough to return to Arrichion.
Now, he said, “would be the right time to get it, to get us through the winter.”
At the same time, for small businesses the new aid is in some ways an improvement on the original rescue package.
It will, for example, let small businesses take a tax deduction
for expenses paid for with PPP money, including payroll, rent and utilities. And companies that already received one PPP loan can seek another if their revenue has dropped by 25 percent in any quarter of 2020 from a year earlier.
Under the new relief measure, hard-hit restaurants and hotels receive especially generous treatment: They can obtain PPP loans worth up to 3.5 times their payroll expenses, versus only 2.5 times payroll expenses for other companies.
Also, the loans are available to hotels and restaurants that employ up to 300 workers per location. For other businesses, loans are limited to companies that employ 300 in total.
“The PPP money is going to be a huge difference maker if you’re on the cusp right now,” said Pertman, the restaurant consultant. “For the people on the bubble, who are putting their own money in day and day out, it’s going to be huge.”
That said, some of the problems that small businesses now face simply are beyond Congress’ capacity to solve. How long, for instance, can they survive when their customers either are locked down or choosing to stay home?
Tiffany Joy Murchison, who couldn’t receive a PPP loan during the first round because of a series of miscommunications with her bank, is willing to try again now that there’s more money available. She needs the aid to help her New York-based publicity firm find new clients. She’s lost revenue during the pandemic because her clients generally are small, struggling organizations.
“I would be able to continue paying my staff while putting full effort into scaling my business, going after larger corporations, organizations, and government agencies that are less likely to be impacted by swings in the economy,” Murchison said.