Recommendation to receive and file a report on recommendations on business license taxes and business fees with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic; Approve recommendation to allow deferral of payment of business license taxes and fees until March 31, 2021; and Approve a recommendation to provide for grants to businesses to offset business license taxes and fees for those businesses closed or materially restricted and impacted for an extended period of time due to the City Health Orders, with an estimated and maximum cost of $1.3 million plus administrative costs of $75,000. (Citywide)
It would please item seven in place. Report from Financial Management Recommendation to receive and file a report on recommendations on business license, taxes and business fees with regard to COVID 19 pandemic citywide. So moved by some the. Anybody come in on the side. There's no public comment on this item. Okay. Do we have a first and. Second, please? Yeah. And I'd like to speak to the make or break. Okay. I think so. And I'll be brief. So, first of all, I know that. So I know that a number of council members contributed to this. I know Council Member Suber now contributed this. Council member price contributed to this. And I love what staff has brought back and I may just want to tailor it just a bit. I love structuring this. We talked about ways to support struggling businesses and it led with you started with the conversation on restaurants and what came back is a grant program and I am just question for staff who designed this. Tom This is mostly designed by financial management and by economic development. They did a really good job. I like what I see here and I want to ask if there's some room. I'd like to. So it looks like it's 1.3 million in grants. It seems like that may do we anticipate that that money will. I remember last time we did the 800,000, it went by really, really quickly. I think I think I may want to suggest that we sort of stagger and prioritize since the conversation started with the restaurants. We prioritize restaurants here, particularly full service, full service, independent restaurants across the city. And so I want to hear staff's reaction to that. And if they're good with it, I'd like to make that structure. That is the motion. So can you give us a little more information on how you'd like to structure? Are you saying that they should have a certain percentage of the funds, or do you just want us to monitor that as we do our kind of criteria? If you can talk a little bit about that and Jan GROSS can also weigh in with some ideas. Oh, so so two things. Let me be more clear. Here's the way I want to go with this motion. So, one, I think we should prioritize the fire, the health and the alarm feeds. And then we talked about, you know, some challenges with the business license fee. And that's a small component of this. The ones that people are concerned about mostly are fire health and a lot of these platforms. And I think that will spread the pot, make it go a lot farther. Secondly, I think we should target full service independent restaurant operators. I sense it's a limited amount of funding. That's why I'd like to see targeted assets is a small amount of money. And so if you could respond to that, then I'll I'll make a motion. So, yes, the way the program set up is that it's essentially on an impact basis. So it looks at who if you've been closed for more than 30 days, you are pro-rated at a certain amount and then it goes all the way up to if you've been closed for 90 days. We have certain businesses in there that are exempt. So this doesn't apply to retail. It doesn't apply to fast food restaurants. So restaurants in full service are definitely in there, but so are other types of services that have been impacted by the health orders. It's really up to the council if you want to keep the 1.3 million, but you want to focus it by eliminating the business license fee, part of it, which is the smaller amount and go with the other fees. That's an option. And you can also give us direction on whether I'd like just to know, when you say prioritize restaurants, you mean only restaurants or more, more. The money should go to restaurants, less to others. That's what we're the direction we would need. Yeah, I, I'd like to see restaurants. I'm open. If the council says, hey, let's include everyone. I think we should just at least make sure, like, 75% of this is restaurants. I'm sure the rest of the council members are hearing what I'm hearing, that there certainly a lot of anxiety among the restaurants. I think we should focus on trying to get whatever support we can to them, particularly until we see whether there's going to be relief in terms of Heroes Act or something like that. I'd love to make sure that these dollars have as great of an impact as possible to the votes. But my motion would be we target this, the restaurant, so so I would make the motion the way that we discussed. So this is all service independent restaurants for the fire, the health and the alarm fees. At the 75% or higher than that? I think we do 100%. But if the council wants to negotiate that, I'm fine with that. I think we go 100%. We just target restaurant. Yeah, understood. Fine. There's a second accept councilman reticence to. Who's the second? Who's in the house? Yes. But this is in Chad. Yes. Okay, fine. Does anyone else wish to speak on this side? Could we please go vote? District one. I District two. I. District three. I. District four. I. District five. I. District six. I. District seven. I District eight. Hi. District nine. All right. Motion carries. Thank you. Item 159. I know. Councilman Pearce. Well rescheduled for the eighth. Do we need a motion in a second to withdraw that vote tonight?