Day: January 14, 2019

BOSTON — Massachusetts employers gave a big “bah, humbug” to the year-end economy as business confidence withered in the face of a government shutdown and the largest one-month stock-market decline since the Great Depression.

The Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM) Business Confidence Index lost three points to 58.6 during December, its lowest level since December 2016. Confidence readings have dropped five points during the past 12 months.

The retreat was led by an 8.6-point drop in employer views of the national economy, and a 4.7-point drop among manufacturing companies. Overall confidence remains within optimistic territory, but less comfortably so than earlier in 2018.

“The Massachusetts economy remains strong, with a 3.3% growth rate and an unemployment rate of 3.4%, but employers are increasingly concerned about factors such as financial-market volatility, a dysfunctional national political debate, and challenges such as the cost of providing health insurance to employees,” said Raymond Torto, chair of AIM’s Board of Economic Advisors (BEA) and lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The AIM Index, based on a survey of Massachusetts employers, has appeared monthly since July 1991. It is calculated on a 100-point scale, with 50 as neutral; a reading above 50 is positive, while below 50 is negative. The Index reached its historic high of 68.5 on two occasions in 1997-98, and its all-time low of 33.3 in February 2009. It has remained above 50 since October 2013.

AMHERST — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently awarded biogeochemist Marco Keiluweit, assistant professor of Soils and the Environment in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at UMass Amherst, along with his collaborators elsewhere, two grants to study how climate change affects the capacity of soils to remove carbon from the atmosphere and retain enough nutrients for food production. 

In particular, the teams will investigate climate-change-related effects of drought and virus infection in plants, and their interaction with soils. Keiluweit and colleagues received $200,000 and $300,000 exploratory research awards from DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research program, which supports “high-risk, high-reward” research, the soil-chemistry expert says.

“It’s basic science to develop a better understanding of the processes that sequester carbon in soils to put us in a better position to predict how soils may respond to climate change,” Keiluweit explained. “Plant root-soil interactions are important for two crucial functions of soils — carbon storage and agricultural production — but we don’t really understand how they are being altered by climate change. For example, prolonged droughts or increased virus infections can severely impact plants, with unknown consequences for root-soil interactions.”

Keiluweit’s collaborators include Zoe Cardon at the Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratory, the principal investigator on one of the grants, and Malak Tfaily at the University of Arizona, Carolyn Malmstrom at Michigan State University, and William J. Riley at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Their drought-focused research will look at plants in an alpine watershed near Gothic, Colo., where root-soil interactions are key regulators of ecosystem carbon storage and downstream nutrient loadings, the researchers say. These areas have been shown to be particularly vulnerable to climate change, they point out.

For this work, Keiluweit says he and collaborators will make “very fine scale measurements of what is happening at the interface between roots and soil” in both greenhouse and field experiments. They want to explore what they call “elusive mechanisms” driving root-soil interaction, which may mobilize a “vast pool of organic matter that has been stabilized by associations with minerals for centuries or millennia.” Such mechanisms are missing from conceptual and numerical models of carbon cycling in soils, they note.

“Roots try to manipulate the soil environment to make it more habitable for themselves,” said Keiluweit. “They fix carbon from the atmosphere and send it to the root, where it is released as organic carbon compounds into what we call the rhizosphere — the soil surrounding the root — to reshape it to their needs for water, nutrients and minerals, and to attract beneficial microbes and suppress harmful ones.

“We’re learning more and more about the rhizosphere and the intricate interactions that take place between roots and microbes,” he went on. “We think there is a synergistic interplay that allows them to mobilize organic matter, which is rich in carbon and nutrients, from minerals. Micro-scale measurements will allow us to reveal more of this interplay and how it relates to soil carbon storage and fertility.”

SPRINGFIELD — Springfield Technical Community College will offer EMT classes beginning Tuesday, Jan. 22. Students can choose to take day or evening courses to complete the program. Training takes place three days a week between January and April. Day classes are held between 8 a.m. and noon. Night classes run from 6 to 10 p.m.

The program consists of 171 hours of in-class lectures and a minimum of 20 hours of online training, a field trip, and workshops to prepare for the state certification.

Based on the Department of Transportation curriculum for Basic Emergency Medical Technician, the program is approved by the Massachusetts Office of Emergency Medical Services. The course covers basic life-support skills and techniques, patient assessment, and transporting patients.

For more information, contact the Workforce Development Center at (413) 755-4225 or [email protected].

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the partial government shutdown enters its fourth week, small businesses across the country are starting to feel the effects of the shutdown, resulting in unnecessary uncertainty at the start of a new fiscal year.

Keith Hall, president and CEO of the National Assoc. for the Self-Employed, the nation’s leading advocate and resource for the self-employed and micro-business community, called on Congress and the White House to work together to end the shutdown on behalf of America’s small-business community. 

The Washington Post is now reporting that, as of Dec. 22, the Small Business Administration stopped processing new small-business loans due to the government shutdown. Thousands of small-business owners across the country are unable to receive critical funding to start and grow their businesses because of the partial government shutdown. Even when full funding is restored, a backlog is likely.

“The negative consequences of one of the longest shutdowns in U.S. history is now fully impacting our country’s small-business community,” said Hall. “From uncertainty around how the shutdown could impact delays in tax refunds small businesses were looking to invest from this year’s new tax law to the shuttering of the Small Business Administration impacting small-business loans, America’s small businesses are on the front lines feeling the adverse impact. 

“The government shutdown has created additional uncertainty during a critical time when small businesses are starting a new fiscal year,” he continued. “Small businesses must continue to abide by their tax obligations, including paying quarterly tax estimates and adhering to all filing deadlines. However, the federal government is unlikely to keep their end of the deal by processing tax refunds on time and providing small businesses access to critical answers they may have to questions about filing for the first time under the new tax law.”

During the shutdown, about 12% of IRS staff are expected to continue working, according to the agency’s lapsed funding contingency plan. This will result in the inability of such functions as staff being available to answer questions for small businesses filing for the first time under the new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act law going into full effect this tax year. It could also negatively impact the ability of IRS staff to process tax refunds in a timely manner, resulting in delays.