Kautz Urges Business Owners to Support New Ordinance

(Editor's Note: Council member Kelly Kautz sent this email to local media Monday afternoon, urging residents to attend the April 11 city council meeting. We are publishing the email in its entirety.)

If you own a small business please come to tonight's City Council meeting at 7:30. I have an ordinance that will allow small business to apply for a financial hardship for their occupational tax. The exemption would be limited and would cost the city very little, however, it would mean a great deal to the businesses in our community.

Of course I do not have the support of the majority of Council because "the timing is not right." As the Mayor stated he would hate for me to be able to put that I helped small businesses on a campaign flyer.  This is the same excuse that was used when I tried to pass an Ethics ordinance for the City. Unfortuantley, the Council has been supportive of the ordinance up until now so it has drawn very little attention.

When talking with our local businesses they feel that in this (tough) economy the one thing that the City could do to help them is to lower their business taxes. In looking at the numbers a small business really does not pay much in occupation taxes. The ordinance could have the potential to assist over 1000 businesses in Snellville without costing the City a small amount of money. The top 10 businesses (who would not be eligible under this ordinance) actually pay almost half of the revenue collected by the City.

This would not affect your property taxes but it would show goodwill to our small businesses that make up our community. It's time we did something good for the city not ourselves or politics. Please support this measure tonight.

A draft of the ordinance can be found at www.snellville.org

Thank you.

Kelly Kautz