Wednesday, April 15, 2020

City Council Meeting

Caught the City council meeting  streamed on Zoom last night. It went far faster than a normal council meeting would. I think the new technology inhibited the willingness of council members to comment on various topics since several of them accidentally muted themselves during the meeting., plus members of the community could only communicate to the council through email or instant messages.

The upcoming budget was discussed but the main topic of the meeting was the request by a number of restaurants to waive collection of March's food and beverage tax. After some discussion, the council decided to take no action on the request, effectively requiring collection of the taxes for March.  Council had two primary reasons for this:  1. The largest portion of the tax is collected by chain restaurants such as Chili's and MacAllister's Deli, with the smaller local restaurants generally remitting about $2000 and 2. Federal and state aid is starting to funnel into the regions (Traxx has already received a grant), so the council wanted to wait and see about what other funding would come in before waiving collection of the tax, since doing so would noticeably affect the city's treasury.

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