Fairfield County Business Journal 050817

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3 | BUILDING TRUST May 8, 2017 | VOL. 53, No. 19

12 | RE-ADAPTING

YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR REGIONAL BUSINESS NEWS

Minding your business

See story on page 2

westfaironline.com

Tick…Tick… Tick… BOOM IN PARASITES KEEPS VETS, ERs, LANDSCAPERS BUSY BY PHIL HALL phall@westfairinc.com

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“This is really just the title of the novel,” said Chris Bruhl, president and CEO of The Business Council of Fairfield County. “It’s a series of goals, not realities, so it’s really not very realistic to have any detailed sense of what it means.” “It’s just a starting point,” said Christine M. Brew, a tax attorney at Cohen and Wolf PC in Westport. “You’ve got to start somewhere. But filling in the gaps is what will really be important.” “Everyone is in some agreement on having some kind of tax reduction,” said Michael Spiro, a tax attorney and partner at Finn Dixon & Herling LLP in Stamford. “It seems like the stars are aligned for significant tax reform, with a Republican Congress and a Republican president committed to it. But the stars seemed aligned for health care reform and that hasn’t hap-

onnecticut’s tick population is back with a vengeance, which is bad news for people and their pets, but a profitable opportunity for businesses and organizations involved in tick treatments and mitigation. How bad is the tick infestation? The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES) reported 500 ticks submitted to its laboratories for testing in April — in previous years, that number would be 24 or less. Last year, Fairfield County sent 1,237 ticks — the greatest number of ticks from any Connecticut county — to the lab for testing, and 26.3 percent of those ticks were found to be infected with Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease. Last month, a pair of troubling news stories reaffirmed the gravity of the problem: a man took his dog for a 30-minute walk around the West Hartford Reservoir and came home with 30 ticks on his pet (photographic evidence was widely shared by mainstream and social media), and a 11-month-old boy in Griswold was diagnosed with the rare tick-borne Powassan virus when he was 5 months old, the first recorded case in Connecticut. Jay Fedak, a physician assistant at AFC Urgent Care in Danbury, had his own recent tick encounter. “I pulled off one last night while walking the dog,” he recalled, adding that the rate of recent patient calls and visits related to ticks has increased considerably to his medical clinic. “My guesstimate would be about 5 to 10 percent of our patients,” Fedak said. Across town at Danbury Hospital, the rising number of patient calls related to tick bites has stretched into months when such activity was traditionally rare-

» Trump tax plan, page 6

» Ticks, page 6

Westport company co-founders Tye Schlegelmilch, left, and Bill Green are expanding their cloud-based professional property management service into New York after launching in Fairfield County in January.

Devil in the (missing) details TRUMP TAX PLAN GETS MIXED REVIEWS

BY KEVIN ZIMMERMAN kzimmerman@westfairinc.com

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onnecticut business leaders said they appreciated President Donald Trump’s recently proposed tax plan in broad strokes, but largely agreed that its lack of details was vexing. The Trump proposal, released on April 26, is more of an outline than an in-depth plan. Consisting of fewer than 200 words

and just seven numbers, the document proposes cutting the corporate tax rate by more than 50 percent — from 35 percent to 15 percent — and allowing millions of small businesses that are structured so that they are affected by the individual tax rate to use the 15 percent rate as well. In addition, the plan calls for replacing the seven federal income tax brackets with three new ones, eliminating the alternative minimum tax and estate tax and creating new incentives to simplify filing returns.


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