Pismo Beach Business Owners Speak Out Against City’s Aggressive Ordinance Enforcement
Jarrod Zinn
PISMO BEACH, Calif. (KEYT) – Business property owners in Pismo Beach are raising their voices against recent aggressive enforcement of licensing ordinances, which they disagree with.
They seek an update to the ordinance.
Last year the city’s leadership hired the services of an auditing agency to begin collecting business license taxes.
Before they entered the picture, the city clerk always collected business taxes.
“The city has begun attempting to enforce an outdated and archaic business license ordinance,” says Mark Burnes, a property management servicer.
Local business property owners say a municipal code from 1987 is being cited for recent enforcement letters sent by third-party auditing company, H.D.L.
“The ordinance itself was from 1946,” says Burnes. “And the 1987 update specifically excluded a number of the paragraphs and sub chapters in the ordinance that they are attempting to enforce now.”
These letters contain aggressive and threatening messages of non-compliance, guilt of misdemeanors, even arrests and jail time for not paying business license taxes, some of which the city has never required before.
“They’ve never in all these years never come after landlords,” says Burnes. “We now know why because they repealed that part of the ordinance. So the staff is either unaware of that or they are willfully trying to circumvent it.”
Some property owners say they pay property taxes, their business tenants pay for their own business licenses and the city has never required the landlords to pay any kind of underlying business tax, but now suddenly they are.
“Our business code is very clear that any business activity that is transacted in the city requires a business license,” says Pismo Beach city manager Jorge Garcia. “So the rent is an underlying business. There is revenue that is exchanged from one entity into another.”
City manager Jorge Garcia acknowledged the issues with language used by H.D.L., but maintains the city’s position that commercial landlords need business licenses.
“The letters that were sent out by HDL were standard letters that H.D.L. sends out to other communities,” says Garcia. “Might have been a little too heavy handed. When we heard that feedback from our businesses, we immediately reached out to H.D.L., had them stop that practice. We continue to engage and we want to have that dialog. We want to have a civil discussion on how we can work together to make sure that we have it right here For Pismo Beach.”
Property owners say they thought they were getting a public hearing at Pismo Beach’s upcoming city council meeting Tuesday night, but the subject is on the agenda as a business item, which will only be discussion, and no action will be taken.
Property owners and business owners plan to attend tomorrow night’s meeting, hoping to change it to a public hearing.
City manager Jorge Garcia says there will be public comment at the meeting.
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