Governor also signs bill expanding number of hours teens can work
The rate of New Hampshire’s business profits tax will fall next year after Gov. Chris Sununu signed a flurry of 63 bills into law late last week.
House Bill 1221 cuts the rate of the BPT from 7.6 percent to 7.5 percent, or about $8.5 million, and also gives a one-time infusion of $28 million in aid to municipalities in the hopes that they will use the money to cut property taxes. While labeled “a local property tax reduction” in the bill, there is no obligation for cities and towns to use the money to reduce property taxes. The money will go to the towns in July, while the BPT cuts won’t go into effect until January. The rate of the business enterprise tax remains unchanged.
Sununu signed the bill last Friday without fanfare, even though cutting business taxes was a key part of his part of his State of the State address in January, when he extoled the virtues of cutting them in the past and urged lawmakers, “Let’s do it again.”
Also among the bills Sununu signed into last Friday:
- Senate Bill 345, which increases to 35 the number of hours 16- and 17-year-olds can work during a school week to 35, five more than they can currently. It also eliminate all restrictions about working nights as well as the number of hours they can work during non-school weeks. It also allows teenagers to work more than six days in a row and lowers the age at which kids can bus tables from 15 to 14 years old. The bill goes into effect immediately.
- HB 1097, which tries to give the state better legal standing in future challenges from other states, like Massachusetts, from taxing the incomes of remote workers of companies based in that state, as happened earlier in the pandemic.
- HB 1420, which prohibits the issuance of new landfill permits until the state’s solid waste plan is updated
- SB 367, which allows for plants to engage in “advanced recycling,” without being treated as a solid waste facility. The process used heats plastics into a kind of chemical soup to make new products, with the goal of making sure plastics don’t go in the landfill. The bill won’t go into effect until 60 days after passage.
- SB 321, which sets up a pilot program for larger business that can’t participate in net metering. Businesses with the capacity to generate up to 5 megawatts of renewable energy would get credits when they transmit that energy to the grid when it is most needed.