CA govt. drives out another business

Warren Meyer finally had it. With the new year, he closed his park business in California.

California no longer will be able to harass him, nor to collect taxes from him and his now unemployed ex-employees, many of whom will collected benefits from the state treasury.

He told the details to Reason magazine:

• It took years in Ventura County to make even the simplest modifications to the campground we ran.  For example, it took 7 separate permits from the County (each requiring a substantial payment) just to remove a wooden deck that the County inspector had condemned.  In order to allow us to temporarily park a small concession trailer in the parking lot, we had to (among other steps) take a soil sample of the dirt under the asphalt of the parking lot. It took 3 years to permit a simple 500 gallon fuel tank with CARB and the County equivalent. The entire campground desperately needed a major renovation but the smallest change would have triggered millions of dollars of new facility requirements from the County that we simply could not afford.
• In most states we pay a percent or two of wages for unemployment insurance.  In California we pay almost 7%.  Our summer seasonal employees often take the winter off, working only in the summer, but claim unemployment insurance anyway.  They are supposed to be looking for work, but they seldom are and California refuses to police the matter.  Several couples spend the whole winter in Mexico, collecting unemployment all the while.  So I have to pay a fortune to support these folks’ winter vacations.
• California is raising minimum wages over the next 2 years by $2.  Many of our prices are frozen by our landlord based on past agreements they have entered into, so we had no way to offset these extra costs.  At some point, Obamacare will stop waiving its employer mandate and we will owe $2000-$3000 extra additional for each employee. There was simply no way to support these costs without expanding to increase our size, which is impossible (see above) due to County regulations.

Note that the minimum wage increase, which Gov. Jerry Brown and other supporters claim will help workers, hurt them here by getting them laid off. Most politicians and government functionaries have no idea how private business works. When government costs go up, they just raise taxes, like Brown’s $7 billion Proposition 30 in 2012.

But when costs go up for business, either some way is found to increase revenues, or the business goes bust, or moves somewhere else. In this case, the business closed.