2006 AeA Silicon Valley/Northern CA Council's
High-Tech Legislator of the Year Award Luncheon
Friday January 19, 2007

 
From Left to Right: Assemblyman Guy Houston;
Betty Baker, Executive Director, AeA Silicon Valley/Northern CA Council; and Joe Gregorich, Legislative Analyst, AeA CA Public Policy.
More pictures at the end of this article.

The AeA Silicon Valley/Northern California Council awarded Assemblyman Guy Houston with the AeA Silicon Valley/Northern California High-Tech Legislator of the Year Award for his outstanding support of AeA's priority issues in 2006 on January 19, 2007.  The award presentation was held as a luncheon at Hap's Original in downtown Pleasanton.

Assemblyman Houston has been selected for pro-actively working with AeA on our priority bills and his solid voting record.  With AeA almost 100% of the time, Assemblyman Houston was always personally available to meet with us on any and every issue.  Key bills he supported AeA and our members in include:

• Healthcare Bill that would have mandated that any company with 10,000 or more employees would have to pay 8% of employee pay to healthcare. AeA and Assemblyman Houston opposed this bill because the technology industry's 8% would have been disproportionately higher than any other industry due to our higher rate of pay and would have been a financial burden to our member's bottomlines.



• Tax Bill - AB675 would have required businesses with assets over $10 million to file an "information return" in ADDITION to their tax return with the CA Franchise Tax Board, to explain the difference between their book income and their taxable income. Assemblyman Houston agreed with our position that this bill requiring yet an additional "information return" be filed with the state is unnecessary and would add costs and burdens to doing business in California without offering protection to shareholders they don't already have.



• An Environmental Bill that would have required all companies to label their electronic products with the average energy they consume when they are on and off. Assemblyman Houston opposed this with AeA because this type of energy usage is hard to predict due to differences in how consumers use a product and the numbers to do not mean anything to the average consumer.

The California legislature has 36 new representatives, and due to short term limits there is no institutional memory for new legislators to glean from.  Assemblyman Guy Houston, stressed that legislators are generalists with little to no background in high-tech, and it requires a substantial amount of time on the ground to come up to speed on all the issues before the legislature.  When High-Tech executives present a united voice by coming to Sacramento in groups, it greatly speeds up the legislator's education of the High-Tech industry and its particular issues and priorities.

In addition to his leadership on our issues last year, Assemblyman Houston was awarded our AeA Silicon Valley/Northern California High-Tech Legislator of the Year Award in 2003 and in 2005, showing his consistent support of the High-Tech Industry.

                           
                      Betty Baker, Executive Director,                       Joe Gregorich, Legislative Analyst,
                         AeA Silicon Valley/Northern CA Council                          AeA CA Public Policy

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