Placing new fees on businesses
that are already coping with a struggling economy, tight credit
and even tighter customers is not the way to ward off recession.
The proposed Barre charter change deserves a resounding "no" vote.More...
As proposed, each business located
in Barre and doing business in Barre would pay an annual fee to feed
ailing city coffers. Pursued as a potentially less distasteful alternative
to taxing business personal property, the annual registration fee
has a fatal flaw; the better it works, the worse it becomes.More...
However, a handful of companies pay the vast majority
of the total.
The top 30 taxpayers pay $250,000 while the remaining 700 pay $145,000.
More than 40 percent of the businesses filing in Montpelier and Barre
Town pay less than $50 annually.
The taxes penalize some of the region's largest and most respected employers
for the equipment they use to operate their companies.
Charts of
those filing and their business personal property tax obligations
illustrate how inequitable the tax can be.
Central Vermont Chamber
PO Box 336
Barre, VT 05641
802.229.5711 cvchamber@aol.com