Staff proposes limiting retroactive business tax collections to seven years as committee weighs burden on longstanding firms

At a finance committee meeting, a staff member outlined recent business tax collection activity and urged members to consider setting a fixed period for retroactive collection. "We're in the process of getting ready to send the 2nd 1 out any day now, and we've collected about 13,000 from that 1st warning letter," the staff member said, describing early results from a collections push.

The staff member said the most recent invoice and credit balance showed a total collected of $24,008.47 and described remaining outstanding balances; in discussion they noted that applying the ordinance retroactively to businesses that have been operating for many years could produce "an outrageous amount of fees" that would make compliance difficult. To avoid that outcome, the staff member suggested the committee consider a finite lookback period ("maybe it's 7 years") rather than permitting indefinite retroactive assessment.

Committee members asked whether the third‑party collector in use had a contractual limit on how far back it looks; the chair and another member said they understood the collector had been using a seven‑year lookback as a practice but that the contract did not explicitly require that timeframe. The staff member said they would research the contract to confirm whether the vendor had imposed the seven‑year standard or whether the committee needed to adopt it formally in ordinance language. The committee ultimately voted to table the ordinance‑change discussion pending further information and resolution of other items on the committee's agenda.