Sane says take time on business license

Published 12:15 am Sunday, September 10, 2006

Whitfield County tax commissioner Danny Sane says he has asked the Board of Commissioners to delay any action on a possible business license until commissioners can have further discussions with local owners.

Sane says he would also like the board to hold off on any action until a new county administrator is in place and has time to look over the idea.

Sane proposed a possible business license to commissioners last year, saying it would help his office collect delinquent taxes since businesses would be required to prove they had paid their property taxes before they could renew a license.

“But I am concerned that the scope of the proposal, and the cost, has grown beyond what I intended,” he said Friday.

Board chairman Brian Anderson said he will relay Sane’s request to the other board members at their Monday work session and ask them to consider a time line for work on the proposal that will give them enough time to not only craft a law but to educate the public on how it will work.

“I’m in no hurry to vote on this just to get it done,” Anderson said Friday.

Anderson said a vote on the measure may not come until January or February. The board must first come to an agreement, not only on the fee structure but also on what types of businesses will be covered, Anderson said.

Sane first proposed a business license to the board last December. He said then the fee should be set no higher than is needed to cover the costs of enforcing the license, possibly $5 or $10.

“The fee should not be a revenue generator,” he said.

Sane said Friday his staff would administer the license and his computer system is already set up to handle the applications. He said he would need only one additional enforcement officer, which would cost the county approximately $32,000 annually.

Sane says he wants only businesses that currently pay county property taxes to have to acquire a license.

“I’m getting a lot of calls from Mary Kay sales people and people like that asking if they will have to get a license, and that certainly isn’t my intent,” he said.

Sane said approximately 3,200 businesses would be covered by his proposal. That would mean a $10 fee to cover the cost of that additional enforcement staff member.

“I can’t imagine the cost being more than $10,” he said.

Commissioner Odell Cochran gave the board a proposal last month that called for a fee of $75, which he says is a break-even number for the license.

Cochran said about two-thirds of the 3,200 businesses Sane cites are located inside the city limits of Dalton and other municipalities and the county can’t license them. He believes it would take two, possibly three people, at least in the first year, to collect all of the information needed to administer the license. That’s why he believes a higher fee would be needed just to break even.

Sane said his office has a high collection rate. It was approximately 97 percent for 2005, for instance. But Sane says that leaves about $1.5 million still uncollected, much of that taxes on business inventories.

Sane says his office will eventually collect much of that $1.5 million, but collecting each of those accounts can take several visits from members of his staff. And given the schedule that property taxes are paid on, it can be up to 16 months after the tax has accrued before his office is notified it is delinquent.

Sane says he doesn’t know how much extra he could collect if the county had a business license, but he says making it easier to collect those taxes would help his office reduce its need to add extra staff and decrease the pressure to raise property tax rates.

“Let’s say you and I and three other people agree to spend $100 on something. That’s $20 apiece. But if one person doesn’t pay, that means the rest of us have to pay $25 each,” he said.