Amy Groves, owner of Nevada’s Finest Properties, LLC, a real estate and HOA-management company, has been in business for eight years and pays over 30 different taxes, licenses, and fees each year just to stay in business.
“You have people leaving this industry because they can’t afford all the regulations,” says Groves. “There are qualified people who could come from California and other states but they don’t want to deal with all the local red tape.”
Groves’ company currently employs five people, but she’s reluctant to hire new people because state and local taxes make the cost of hiring someone too expensive.
“With unemployment [tax] going up again, it’s costing us over a dollar an hour for every dollar we pay someone, and it makes us leery of hiring another person,” said Groves.
Groves has simple advice for lawmakers looking to make Nevada a more business-friendly state: “Just cut the bureaucracies and let us work.”
Today, the Nevada Policy Research Institute, which publishes Nevada Journal, released a study on economic development, The Path to Sustainable Prosperity, which details steps Nevada needs to take to encourage entrepreneurs like Amy. The study is available at http://www.npri.org/issues/publication/the-path-to-sustainable-prosperity.
Kyle Gillis is a reporter for Nevada Journal, a publication of the Nevada Policy Research Institute. For more in-depth reporting, visit https://nevadajournal.com/ and http://npri.org/.