Fifth District candidates for the state legislature profess support for legislation favoring small business. But only David Spring has been a participant in action to actually achieve tax relief for start-up struggling small businesses to help them succeed.

This action has led to Initiative 1098, providing for increasing the small business tax credit from $420 to $4,800 annually, thereby eliminating the onerous state business and occupations tax for more than 80 percent of small-businesses. Washington Policy Center reports Washington’s small-business failure rate is the second highest in the nation for the second year in a row. This failure rate is attributed mostly to high taxes unaffordable for small businesses struggling for survival.

Spring participated in the early drafting of Initiative 1098 and securing its place on the ballot. An incentive for his insistence on tax relief for small businesses is that he was once a retail business owner. He went on to become an educator, leading to his long-standing identification with efforts to force the legislature to fulfill its constitutional mandate to fund education to save teachers’ jobs also addressed in Initiative 1098.

The initiative makes up for the tax relief accorded small businesses and the middle class, reduces the state property tax, and more, with a very affordable income tax payable by couples on adjusted gross incomes above $400,000 and individuals making more than $200,000. Spring’s opponent Glenn Anderson has expressed opposition to Initiative 1098 while offering no realistically achievable solutions to the problems addressed in this legislation.

As representative, Spring would promise real support of further tax relief for the middle class because he is one of us. We need his representation in the legislature.

Dave Olson

North Bend