The Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing this evening at 7 on the hotly debated Business Professional Occupational License tax, the first such proposed license fee in the county's history.
Board Chairman George Schwartz, who discussed the issue last week before a Democratic Club gathering in Falls Run, called it, "the most important issue in the county in the past 10 years."
He said he expected the measure to pass. "There has been a change in philosophy on the board," Schwartz said, referring to last fall's election that ousted the Republican leadership and gave the Democratic-Independent coalition a 4-3 majority.
A member of the board's three-man Republican minority, Paul Milde, said in a statement, "this new tax in this economy is going to be especially devastating to the business community." Another Republican supervisor, Cord Sterling, called BPOL "incredibly regressive."
GOP Supervisor Mark Dudenhefer said in a statement that the four members of the majority "have no facts on which to base their rhetorical conclusions." He said, "anyone with common sense knows that the tax will be passed on to the affected business customers."
He also criticized Schwartz's "unilateral" decision to hold tonight's public hearing in the Board of Supervisor's chambers. Last Thursday Schwartz said, "we expect a big crowd Tuesday night."
"In the past," Dudenhefer said, "large public hearings were held in one of our high school auditoriums."
BPOL is a tax on the gross revenue of a business, not on the profit. The state code sets a $100,000 floor on taxable gross revenues, below which there would be no tax. Schwartz said the Stafford threshold would be set at $200,000.
"Small businesses need not be worried," Schwartz said. "And big businesses, like Target or Home Depot, will not be significantly affected. Prices will not change."
Republican supervisors challenged that. Milde said that the board had already raised commercial property taxes this year "by an astounding 54 percent on average." He said, "It would be irresponsible to raise them any more in this economy."
Sterling said, "this is not the time to be doing this, given the economic climate." He said the cost ot the tax "would be passed along to the customer, with the result that lower-income people will pay more disproportionately."
"BPOL is the only means by which counties may license a business. Up to now, business in Stafford has basically had a free ride," Schwartz said. However, Milde said the business community "accounts for more than 31 percent of all county revenues."
Forty-five counties and 36 cities and towns in Virginia have BPOL, Schwartz said, "including King George, Spotsylvania, Caroline and Fredericksburg."
Both Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania "have had significant growth in their business base over the 14-year period they have had BPOL in place," Schwartz said. "Stafford has missed the boat."
Milde cited a state study of more than 140 cities and counties in the Commonwealth that found Stafford, over the last five years, has been first in professional job creation, third in employment growth, and fourth in wage growth and business growth.
"Our neighbors, who do have BPOL, aren't even in the top 10, except Spotsylvania, which still lags behind us," Milde said.
Stafford expects to raise $4 million from BPOL the first year, Schwartz said. The money would be used first to pay down the debt service, he said, "and then it would go into transportation needs."
"This is a BPOL state," the board chairman said. "The issue is basically a no-brainer. It can only be good for the county."
Hugh Muir: 540/735-1975
Email: hmuir@freelancestar.com