A bill for an Ordinance repealing Article X (Tax on TaxiCab Operators), Chapter 53 (Taxation and Miscellaneous Revenue) of the Denver Revised Municipal Code. Amends Article X of Chapter 53 of the Denver Revised Municipal Code to repeal the tax upon taxicab operators to reflect that the City has never collected this tax. The Committee approved filing this bill at its meeting on 5-16-17.
Okay, Madam Secretary. You know, jump the gun, please. Put that up. Yeah, we just need to switch it over real quick. There we go. All right. Go ahead and ask your question. I'm going to actually quickly hand this off. Good evening, Citi's chief financial officer, and to have Steve Ellington, the city's treasurer, talk about the process that got us here and in the methodology behind it . And please give us a little context of what we're talking about here. Sure. So, good evening, City Council. My name is Steve Ellington. I'm the city treasurer and we have four ordinance proposed ordinances before you today. The first one, 17 526 is an ordinance requesting to repeal the tax upon taxicab operators. That was a tax that was first implemented back in 1953, but was never actually imposed by the city, and we were not certain why it was never imposed. We have some theories that it had something to do with back. At that point in time, the PUC was coming on board and started regulating the taxicab industry and what fees and charges could be imposed on them. And so therefore, the city never imposed this this tax. It's been on our books that we're looking to just go ahead and have it repealed. Let me see here. Ordinance Bill. Request 1705 27 is a request to go ahead and completely exempt water from taxation. Currently, water for domestic use is exempt if you buy water at home and it's exempt. But businesses that use it in industrial purposes currently would have to pay use tax on it. Denver Water is not imposing the tax, so it's on the business to pay pay the use tax to Denver. Currently, Denver is one of only two municipalities in the front range that impose this tax. And so we're trying to align our code with the other home rule municipalities that we that share borders with us. So to make it easier on the business community to impose the taxes. Let me see your set, bill 17 0528. Is is a rather long process. We worked with all of the other jurisdictions through CML. This was mandated via a bill that was passed by the state legislature back in 2014. It was asking municipalities to look at our tax codes and to standardize our definitions to make it easier for businesses that do business in multiple jurisdictions, to know that the definition of a chair is the same in every jurisdiction. And so after a whole lot of work with all of our other home rule municipalities and and CML, we came up with this list of standardized definitions. And so that's what we have before you today to to pass into our sales and use tax codes. And then the final bill that we have is 17 0529, which seeks to. Change the definition of charitable corp. Currently, the Denver Revised Municipal Code has a very narrow definition of charitable corp, so we're looking to expand it to fall in line with what the federal government and most state governments impose. And that's the 501c3. So basically any business entity association or what have you that qualifies as a501c3 under the IRS code would now be exempt from paying Denver sales tax use tax lodgers. Tax in business occupational privilege tax. Right. And there's still a loss of about, what, $14 million, something like that, or the estimated impact for for that provision of of the changes that we're seeking is between 11 and 14 million is what our estimate is budgeted for this year. So it. Is. And that's. Why we have a multiyear. Implementation of this proposal over the next three years, starting in 2017. Thank you for the clear explanation. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. And then, Madam Secretary, can you now pull up council bill 561. Councilman New has called this out for postponement. Councilman Flynn. I'm sorry. Yeah. 565. Councilman Flynn, we need a motion to take this out of order.