Opinion: LTN endorses June 5 ballot measures B and C
El Dorado County voters are being asked on June 5 to approve two measures that would help small businesses.
Measure C is a countywide measure that would alter El Dorado County’s Charter that was approved in 1994. It would allow department heads to approve expenditures of $10,000 or less. As it is now, anyone doing work for the county must have a formal contract no matter what is being done.
Measure B is just for South Lake Tahoe and would change the business license structure by lowering the annual tax for most businesses, while increasing the cap for a handful.
Lake Tahoe News is recommending a yes vote on both measures. They each need 50 percent plus one vote to pass.
Measure C would streamline business in El Dorado County. In turn, this means businesses – many of which are small – would be paid in a more timely fashion. It will also reduce county staff time and paperwork.
All of this makes for a more efficient, effective government operation.
It does not mean oversight has been eliminated. There are checks and balances in place to make sure money is not leaving county bank accounts for purposes other than what was intended. And there are protocols to ensure it was a necessary purchase or the work performed was required.
County Counsel Lou Green wrote the impartial analysis of Measure C for voters. He says, “The purpose of the measure is to simplify the contracting process with service providers who do not traditionally use signed contracts in their business, and who frequently resist the county’s request for a written contract. However, the proposed amendment does not allow for undocumented transactions.”
A similar measure was on the ballot a few years ago that would have allowed expenses up to $15,000 be approved without a contract. That failed 51 percent to 49 percent.
As a comparison, South Lake Tahoe’s city manager is allowed to approve expenses up to $6,000 without council approval and contracts up to $30,000.
Besides Lake Tahoe News, other supporters of Measure C include Supervisor John Knight, Supervisor Ron Briggs, District Attorney Vern Pierson, Sheriff John D’Agostini, Auditor-Controller Joe Harn, and the El Dorado Hills Chamber of Commerce board of directors.
Measure B in a slightly different format was also before voters in recent years and barely failed.
What is different this time around is this will lock in rates for businesses whose gross sales do not increase. As it is today and was on the previous ballot measure that did not pass, the business license tax increased each year based on the consumer price index. The CPI component has been eliminated in Measure B.
Ninety-eight percent of South Lake Tahoe businesses would have a lower tax with the passage of Measure B.
While Lake Tahoe News supports Measure B, there are two flaws. One is the timing. The vote is June 5 and the new rate structure takes effect July 1 – when the annual license is paid to the city. This was poor planning on the city’s part. The increase should have been delayed to 2013 to give businesses the opportunity to work the new rates into their budget.
The other flaw is with not keeping the CPI part of the tax structure. Without having it in there, and assuming Measure B passes, one day the city will be collecting less money than it did in 2011.
Conflicting messages have come out of city hall as to whether Measure B is all about making things more equitable for businesses or if the intent is to bring in a couple hundred thousand dollars more a year.
Lake Tahoe News likes both reasons. We just don’t understand why the CPI component was eliminated and strongly disagree with that decision. But we don’t disagree enough to vote no.
Measure B is for businesses. Yes, the cap goes from about $3,000 a year to $20,000 – but that means those making more money are paying a fairer percentage of their gross income. The measure attempts to level the paying field, so to speak.
South Tahoe Chamber of Commerce has come out against Measure B. Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce is not taking a stance.
Lake Tahoe News says yes to B and C.
Measure B would raise taxes for South Shore supermarkets like Raleys, Safeway, Grocery Outlet. Also likely affected would be high volume gas stations.
If you do not want your grocery prices to go up even more, vote “No” on Measure B. When taxes increase, businesses pass along the increase to consumers.
South Lake Tahoe’s grocery and gasoline prices are high enough already without increasing taxes to the city even more.
The city wants to increase taxes but cant even manage a bear box contract. I dont think they should get more money until its clear they can manage what they have.
Thank you, Steve, that is one of the big reasons the South Tahoe Chamber is against this Measure. Consider also the statement “gross receipts.” Different businesses have different expenses, so the profit margins can vary greatly, but the tax would still be based on “gross receipts.” These larger businesses employ a lot of people and many are already cutting hours and laying workers off. More taxes equal more cuts and that means less money for residents to spend with the smaller businesses here. Also in play is the utility companies. They would pay greater taxes and who do you think would suffer rate increases to cover those costs? Ratepayers, aka residents. The South Tahoe Chamber of Commerce is known as the “little guys Chamber.” We just don’t think this is a good time to raise taxes on any business. We have suggested several ways for the City to save money, but our suggestions have not been taken. We wish the City would involve us more in the input.
“Measure B is for businesses. Yes, the cap goes from about $3,000 a year to $20,000 – but that means those making more money are paying a fairer percentage of their gross income. The measure attempts to level the playing field, so to speak.”
It doesn’t seem right that the really large stores such as Safeway, Raleys, Ross, CVC, etc. only pay an annual maximum business licensing fee of approximately $3,000. My wife operates a very small business and would never reach the maximum annual gross revenue cutoff where the $3,000 cap goes into effect and her current ratio of gross revenue to tax is 200:1 (for every $200 in gross revenue she receives she pays $1 in business licensing fees). For a business with $1 million in gross revenues paying the $3,000 max their ratio of gross revenues to business licensing fees would be 333:1 (for every $333 in gross revenues they receive they pay $1 in business licensing fees); for $3 million in gross revenues paying a maximum of $3,000 their ratio of gross revenues to business licensing fees is 1,000:1 (for every $1,000 they make they pay $1) and for stores that have annual gross revenues of $20 million their ratio of gross revenues to business licensing fees would be 6,667:1 (for every $6,667 of gross revenue they take in they pay $1 in business licensing fees). If any of the above listed stores for example had 500 customers per day and each customer spent $100 that would be daily gross receipts of $50,000 per day, and that amount times 365 days is $18,250,000 in gross receipts.
I support Measure B and think it’s time that these larger gross revenue stores that make money in our community start paying more toward making it possible for this community to start fixing our deteriorating infrastructure, such as our streets for example.
YES on B and C.
If it truly was revenue neutral, then the public would know the motivation was fairness. But since it’s not revenue neutral, and thus takes money from the struggling economy to feed our bloated (anybody need a reminder of what top mgt. makes or the pensions many are pulling down) bureaucracy, and since our City is for some weird reason still sitting on an excessive reserve, I think a No vote is in order!
Addendum to above comment:
Business licensing fees are a legitimate cost of doing business and those fees are a tax deduction.
Parker ,Steve are correct.
4-mer: I’m curious, how many employees does your wife give jobs and benefits to? If her costs went up, would she cut hours or jobs on her employees, or just take the financial cut herself? What is her profit margin? Do the Feds and State impose additional fees and mandates, beyond taxes, and if so, how much do those cost? If her cost of doing business goes up, does she pass any of that cost along to the consumers?
Government has to stop looking at business owners for revenue. They must spend more responsibly. The South Tahoe Chamber feels this is not a good time or economy to raise taxes on any business in our town.
this is another attempt to SRINK the TOWN
Ms. O’Connor:
My wife is an independent contractor who has no employees. She pays for her own medical insurance, provides her own IT service, and does her own accounting. This is a small, one person business operation and when she incurs costs for necessary new equipment and software she has had to absorb those costs and take the tax deduction for those purchases. When her operating costs have gone up she has had to absorb those costs also so she doesn’t lose customers.
Not all business operators employ other people or have federal and state imposed fees and mandates. She is trying to eke out a living and it doesn’t seem fair that for every $200 that she works very hard for she pays $1 of business licensing fees and for every $6,667 a multi-million dollar corporation takes in they pay $1 of business licensing fees. I estimate that if a company has gross revenues of $50,000 per day it takes them 87 minutes to make that $3,000 to pay their business licensing fees in SLT. My wife doesn’t make $200 in 87 minutes. Measure B won’t increase my wife’s business licensing fees, it will actually reduce them. Measure B will increase the business licensing fees on large businesses with substantially greater gross revenues.
We obviously have very differing viewpoints and opinions on this matter.
Yo Sarge your missing the point
it is not just the grocery stores
Sports ltd
Barton
all the Lawyers
all the Doctors
all the gas stations
all the Liquor stores
all the Resturants
all the Bars
all the Ski shops
all of these buisness keep our town rolling
the Heave pays nothing
no city buisness license
no fees on the Gondola
it is just another scam to shrink the town
Ms. Connor:
Please accept my apologies for addressing you with an incorrect surname.
As an addendum to my earlier post, additional expenses of my wife’s business which I neglected to include are her payments of both the employer and employee portions of state and federal payroll taxes.
I sometimes wonder why she continues to attempt to operate this business.
Yo Chief:
I’m not missing the point. I’m viewing this from a personal perspective how it affects my family member. I agree with you on your points regarding Heavenly’s non-payment of fees to the City and think that should be remedied. Heavenly makes a lot of money in our town and they should have to pay their fair share for that opportunity. As far as lawyers, doctors, gas stations, liquor stores, etc., they should also pay their fair share for the opportunity of making money in our town and if they don’t pay their fair share then the really little guys are forced to make it up. What will shrink the town are the small, one person businesses that will no longer be able to eke out a living and will be forced to move off the hill and go to work for someone else. Like the independent plumbers, carpenters, handymen, bookkeepers, etc. Once the little fish are gone, the next target will be the medium size fish. Pretty soon there won’t be anything but one-huge corporate fish.
4-mer: Perhaps I was too subtle. I was attempting to point out that all these “big boys” that make a lot of money have a lot of expenses your wife does not. If she had employees, she would pay wages, social security taxes, unemployment,workers comp, perhaps family and sick leave, and in the case of the larger companies, often at least a portion of medical insurance and retirement. They don’t get to keep all they take in either.
Small businesses are less likely to have the degree of expensive mandates from the Feds and state that the bigger companies have.
Grocery stores with meat departments can no longer grind up the meat and some fat they cut off pricer pieces of meat, like steak. They used to use it in ground beef. They can no longer do this, which cuts their profit margin. More health regulations concerning produce and seafood also add to the cost.
Take a look at STR. State mandates will actually fine them if we do not recycle enough of our waste. I hope you can see this isn’t as cut and dried as it seems. The gross, with no deductions or adjustment for cost to get that gross, is not a fair tax. We feel workers will lose jobs or have hours cut, and that will “shrink our town,” as Chief Slow Roller points out. Are any of these employees customers of your wife’s business? That was a concern we had too -less employees to spend money with the “little guys” – all of “us.”
Of note is also the fact that some of these “big boys” use the smaller plumbing companies and local bookkeepers, etc. as much as they can. They aren’t pure evil.
Add to Chief Slow Rollers list: South Tahoe Refuse, STPUD, and Liberty Energy. Raise their taxes and what will happen to the rate payers? What about McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Grocery Outlet? Will your prices go up if their costs go up? These are places that help the little guys survive with lower cost food.
The South Tahoe Chamber membership is acomprised of mostly (approximately 90%)small business owners like your wife. In addition, our Chamber is completely operated by volunteer small business owners. None of us gets paid or even reimbursed for expenses. Yet, when we looked at this Measure and talked to our membership, we decided as a Chamber to stand against it.Just so you know, I own and operate two small businesses in this town and I know about expenses, permits, licenses, and tons of paperwork too.
As a Chamber, we just don’t feel it is the right time to raise taxes on any business in our town.
Ms. Connor:
Thank you for your comprehensive reply. Perhaps I was too subtle: while my wife does not have a staff of employees and those associated expenses that the “big boys” have, she also doesn’t have the revenue the “big boys” have. However, she does need to pay for all of her own medical insurance on which she doesn’t get a group rate like corporations do; she pays both the employee and employer portion of payroll taxes where corporations pay only the employer portion; she researches/selects all her equipment/computer/software which she purchases and needs to keep current so it is compatible with that of her clients, and she doesn’t get any volume discounts; she does all her own accounting work; performs all her own IT work and troubleshooting to keep everything going; has to pay for all supplies; works damn hard to produce a product; and doesn’t get any paid sick days or paid vacation. And while she may not be subject to certain regulations as corporations, she as a one-person show doesn’t get the tax breaks that corporations get. My point is, this is relative; they’re business is corporate huge, her business is miniscule. Unfortunately, whether it seems fair or not, SLT business licensing fees are calculated on gross revenues, they are not calculated on a business’s net or taxable revenue/income. As I said to the Chief, I’m viewing this from a personal perspective and how it affects my family member who operates a one-person business and for every $200 bucks she takes in she pays out $1 in business licensing fees. A corporate owned business taking in $20 million a year needs to take in approximately $6,667 for every $1 in business licensing fees they pay to reach their $3,000 maximum business licensing fee, which they can take in in roughly 87 minutes. I just don’t see how this is any sort of level playing field, and I don’t think that these corporate owned businesses are making an adequate contribution to the community where they are making money. And nobody’s asking them to pay the same revenue to business licensing fee ratio as the really small businesses need to pay so they can keep operating legally.
Like I said before, we have very differing viewpoints and opinions on this matter to which we are each entitled and will likely never agree. I must say that I was not aware that your Chamber was so supportive of the huge, corporate businesses in town. I guess there’s no local Chamber small enough for my wife’s business.
4-mer: Please don’t twist my words; if you read what I said, we are in support of the workers and the effect their subsequent loss of income would have on the small business owners and our community. We also support the residents as a whole,who will likely experience rate hikes and increase in cost of goods if this passes. We are small business owners who go through the same things your wife does. We, however, have attempted to investigate, weigh the facts, and look at the best option for the people as a whole, not just for one particular small business. Belonging to our Chamber is one way all of us have to communicate with other businesses, large and small,and the public and understand their perspective as well.
You are right, your perspective comes from a personal standpoint, and you are entitled. We agree to disagree; our perspective is much broader.
And by the way, it is Conner with an “e.”
Ms. Conner:
Once again I apologize for the misspelling of your surname. (Failing eyesight—another symbol of having lived a long life.)
While I respect your and your Chamber’s opinion to investigate and weigh the facts we also performed our own analysis, weighed the facts, crunched the numbers, and subsequently arrived at a different conclusion. I understand your stated concern of job losses and increased prices, but I just don’t agree that a corporation with annual gross revenues of $20 million or more needing to pay an additional $17,000 annually in business licensing fees to our little City will lead to the types of apocalyptic results you describe. And personally, I’m tired of the great corporate Goliaths scare tactics and threats that if all we little guys don’t just go along with their program that they’ll “fix us”. Besides, government always protects big corporations and I don’t think that our little government would do anything to jeopardize that status quo. Heck, they probably figured out the cutoff threshold that the big corporate-owned businesses in town would tolerate in increased business licensing fees prior to even placing this on a ballot. I say let these big corporations start paying what is not even their fair share to our little town for the opportunity of making money here.
My suggestion to the voting constituency in our town is to vote YES ON B.
Thank you for your reply and I concur, on this matter we will agree to disagree.
4-mer: Actually, when we talked to the “big boys,” we found they had no one from the City or the Council talk to them about their expenses. So no, they didn’t “figure out the cutoff threshold” and they didn’t ask them if some of the bigger businesses would close doors and move out of Tahoe. Then you could have the problem we had 20-30 years ago, where locals HAVE to go off the hill more to get goods they need.With gas prices, that adds to the little guy paying more.
We asked for more responsible spending, not higher taxes.The City is hoping to make an additional $200K from this increase. There were $173K in items we asked them not to pay for, mostly because they benefited Nevada businesses, but they did anyway, including approximately 10K to put this back on tha ballot one year after it was voted down.We don’t want increases on ANY business in town right now, including your wife’s.
Please vote NO on Measure B.
Hi Ms. Conner:
I should have specified that when I stated my belief that “they probably figured out the cutoff threshold that the big corporate-owned businesses in town would tolerate in increased business licensing fees prior to even placing this on a ballot”, I was referring to the City and not the affected “big boys”. Naturally these businesses don’t want to pay anything more; nobody wants to pay anything more for anything.
Like I said before, I respect and appreciate your opinion and position but I just don’t agree with it. I do however wish you great success in your two businesses along with all the Chamber’s other members. The one thing I think we can all agree on is the hope for improved prosperity locally, regionally, statewide, and nationally.
Best wishes to you and best wishes that SLT’s businesses and residents will experience a pleasant and profitable summer season.
Regards – 4-mer
PS: I’m still voting yes on B so I guess our votes will cancel each other out!
As a little guy who has no interest in paying more for groceries and gasoline so the city can continue its expensive blunders and misspending, I hope citizens will vote NO ON B.
There is a reason Raley’s is currently in negotiations with its union. To avoid closing stores and laying off personnel. Its costs are already too high to sustain some stores, which it has closed. Adding fuel to the fire will not help anyone except this city’s well-paid, well-perked, well-pensioned bureaucrats.
Steve, pensions are not going away. Its in their contract. Too late. So how about thinking of something positive for a change.
A bankrupt city vetos everything.
The rationale always given for the exorbitant pay & pensions given to public employees is that that is what’s needed to get attract skilled personnel. If they’re so skilled, employees should then be able to find a way to pay for the exorbitant commitments without sticking it to the taxpayer and thus hurting are already fragile economy!
Again, if this Measure was about fairness this would be a revenue neutral proposal! Instead, it’s disguised as a fairness issue as an attempted way to get the taxpayer to ‘buy into it’.
Lou> what has been veto here lately ?
Reminds me Nasa,all systems go regardless if the rocket in the pocket has no funding or approval.
Could you shine some light on this?