His business has thrived over the years. After all, most owners will spare no expense when it comes to sick pets.

At least, they used to. The Van Nuys veterinarian has noticed recently that more financially strapped clients have stopped getting medical care for their pets and some even have abandoned them.

And now, Nunez has a new worry: a proposal from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to extend the state sales tax to veterinary services. That will add more than 10 percent to pet medical care bills as early as March 1.

The proposal is part of a plan to bring in billions of dollars in additional revenues to help close the state’s $42 billion budget deficit over the next 18 months.

“Veterinary hospitals certainly are not going to absorb these costs, so that means that people with pets will have to make some difficult choices,” said Nunez, a co-owner of Animal Medical Center Inc. “More people are simply going to abandon their sick pets because they can’t afford to care for them.”

Nunez, who takes over in July as president of the California Veterinary Medical Association, is one of a growing chorus of business and industry leaders opposing the governor’s plan to target industries for more tax revenues.

The plan extends the sales tax to several industry segments, from auto repair shops to amusement parks. It also calls for a 10 percent oil extraction tax and a “nickel-per-drink” increase in the alcohol excise tax.

Moreover, the plan would simultaneously raise the statewide base sales tax 30 percent to 6.5 cents per dollar from 5 cents per dollar for the next three years. In many parts of Los Angeles County, where voters have approved additional taxes for transportation and other projects, the total sales tax would add up to 10.25 percent.

All told, the state projects that the increases would raise $2.6 billion in revenues for the current fiscal year ending June 30 and $8.3 billion for the 2009-10 fiscal year.

“Expanding taxes to cherry-picked services is putting businesses in a frightening position,” said John Kabateck, executive director of the California chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business trade group. “They are looking at steep unanticipated costs that they haven’t budgeted for and at a time when they are already under extreme pressure from the recession and scrambling unsuccessfully to get loans.”

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