Malcolm Owen
The Cupertino City Council has temporarily shelved a vote on proposals that would tax Apple and other local companies with 100 or more employees, with the council deciding to postpone discussions on the proposal until 2020.
The council voted 4-0 in favor of delaying the "head tax" vote proposal for two years, The Mercury News reports. The decision, which took place on Tuesday night, temporarily stops the controversial tax on employees from being applied to businesses in the region, including Apple.
The "head tax" is a restructuring of the existing business tax model, which currently requires all 3,500 local businesses to pay an annual fee of $124. Under the proposals, this would be changed to a base rate, followed by an additional per-employee tax for firms with more than 99 workers, with Apple affected the most due to its large workforce at the Apple Park campus, including 24,000 in total across all of Cupertino.
In theory, the change in tax would have helped raise more than $10 million per year, which the council planned to put towards improving infrastructure.
The decision to push back the vote follows commentary from local businesses and other speakers to postpone it until 2020, citing a need for the city to come up with a viable spending plan and perform more outreach to the city's firms.
Apple itself sent a letter to the council on Monday, highlighting the company's significant ongoing investment into sidewalk and crosswalk improvements, along with transportation. Recent improvements performed in concert with the construction of Apple Park is claimed to have helped create more than $70 million in "public benefits" relating to the campus, while other projects to handle increased area traffic were also mentioned.
In June, the city council voted to push the same proposal off a November ballot until 2019.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Mike Wuerthele
William Gallagher
Amber Neely
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8 Comments
They should probably just permanently shelve it and stop running the city on a credit card and expect area businesses to bail them out. Hows that for an idea?
They wimped out, I wonder how many threats they got, if you check I bet some are up for re-election in the next year.
I live in Calif and they hit you all over the place on taxes. What I found interesting living there was the fact people would agree to tax themselves if the government could explain the value. I was out their during the 89 earthquake and everyone in the five countries around the bay are votes to raise sales tax 1.5% for 3 yrs to help pay the cost of the damage to the infrastructure. The 3 yrs came and went most everything was fixed or near completion and the greedy people in government attempt to make the 1.5% additional sales tax permanent but they could not convince the people the value to keep it around they try to say it would help with the next earthquake or they need to do more work on the 89 damage. But the law timed out after 3 yrs and went away.
Personally I am glad I left, i live in state with a flat state tax with not deductions, a low sales taxes and property taxes have been mostly flat for the last 10 yrs. When I retire now of my retirement is taxed by the state, I will only pay feds on the retirement.
I understand they want to make the city nice and upscale, but they need to figure out how to do it on their own, not rely on companies like Apple who already pay MILLIONS of dollars to them to get it done.
It is always easy to expand the role of government. It isn’t so easy to cut it back. There will always be a beneficiary or rent seeker more than ready to squeal at any strategy aimed at turning off the flow through the teat attached to Other Peoples’ Money.