Politics & Government

Local Business Owner Says Minimum Wage Bill is 'Bad for Business'

Highland Park Market Owner Timothy Devanney says a proposal to raise the minimum wage in Connecticut could end up costing his stores hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Not everyone thinks Connecticut needs to raise its minimum wage. 

Certainly not , the owner of the chain of grocery stores with locations in Farmington, Glastonbury, Manchester, Suffield and Coventry that employs about 460 people. Devanney told Patch recently that that would raise the current minimum wage from $8.25 to $8.75 over the next two years would end up costing his business hundreds of thousands of dollars if approved, money that would stifle his future expansion plans and lead to eventual price increases that would have to be passed along to customers. 

"It's just another cost. We've been hammered lately with all these costs," said Devanney, noting the legislature's approval last year of a bill mandating five paid sick days to all employees. Devanney said that bill wound up costing Highland Park about $125,000, while the minimum wage bill is estimated to cost the supermarket chain more than $130,000 in its first year. 

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"We'd like to pay down debts or remodel a store, things like that," Devanney said. "But it's things like this that will eat away at that. And it'll turn into higher prices at some point." 

The bill, pushed by Democratic House Speaker and U.S. Congress candidate Chris Donovan, passed the Connecticut House of Representatives by an 88-62 margin last week, sending it to the Connecticut State Senate, who also need to approve the bill before it could be signed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy into law. The senate has until May 9 to approve the bill, the last day of the current legislative session, but a report by the Connecticut Mirror Tuesday states that the bill appears to lack the necessary votes in the senate for approval. 

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One of those state senators opposing the bill is Steve Cassano, a Democrat who represents Bolton, Glastonbury, Manchester and Marlborough. Cassano said he can't support the bill in its current form because of the costs it will add to the bottom line of numerous small and independent businesses throughout, and because of reports citing that the $.50 increase would have a minimal to negligible impact on the state's poverty rate. 

"I have indicated from day one I'm not ready to support it this year. Simply because we're just not ready for it yet," Cassano said. "We've spent an awful lot of time and effort trying to grow small businesses, and I just think it's too much. We're out there trying to get people to spend money, to open businesses, and then we're going to hit them with another cost on top of paid sick leave?" 

The current bill is itself a compromise from Donovan's original, more aggressive bill, which would have raised the minimum wage to $9.75 in two years and then tied future increases to inflation. That proposal would have given Connecticut the highest minimum wage in the country, according to the Hartford Courant

Devanney said his opposition to the bill is not a knock against his workers - he noted that many of Highland Park's employees who earn the minimum wage are high school or college students who only work part-time at the stores - and that Highland Park conducted a survey asking its employees about things they wanted from an employer several years ago. The results of that survey, Devanney said, led Highland Park to establish a program to help pay for the costs of employees' education, which he said has been very popular with the store's employees. 

If the minimum wage bill were to pass, Devanney said, he did not foresee Highland Park laying off employees, but the supermarket chain would certainly have to think twice about the number of new employees it could hire in the future. 

"We're trying as hard as we can to maintain, and we've always done that. We just feel as though it's a responsibility to keep as many people as we can," Devanney said. "But it gets frustrating when government thinks it knows better than we do what our employees need when we talk to them all the time." 


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