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Work group presents menu of county revenue options including business license, TLT, timber tax and vehicle fees

Columbia County Board of Commissioners · March 18, 2026
AI-Generated Content: All content on this page was generated by AI to highlight key points from the meeting. For complete details and context, we recommend watching the full video. so we can fix them.

Summary

A county revenue-options work group presented a range of revenue ideas — a countywide business license, transient lodging tax, timber severance tax, vehicle registration fee and cable franchise fees — and asked the board for direction and a 30-day follow-up to prioritize options.

Mike Russell, the county public works director, presented a revenue-options report on March 18 that compiles dozens of ideas the work group has discussed since October. The presentation framed options as a menu for the board to consider and asked commissioners to identify which items they want staff to develop further in about 30 days.

Key items discussed included:

- Countywide business license: staff estimated about 4,116 businesses countywide (census-based) and projected potential revenue in the low hundreds of thousands (a figure in the presentation estimated roughly $416,000 annually under one fee schedule) but said more research is needed to determine which businesses are…

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