True. How is the shop coming?
Slowly, had had plumbers in today but shit is slow. City is going to levy a monthly road maintince fee, first quote for my business was $727 a month, which seems fucking insane to me. Talking with the city to get some clarity on how they came up with that abusurd number.
They put forth the proposal and tried to put it to a vote two weeks later. The proposal was a "fee" added on to the existing sewer bill in which every household would pay $12 dollars a month and varied charges to businesses depending on how many visits they received based on a federal data base of average trips to businesses by business type. Fees for coffee shops are some of the highest for the service industry. A McDonalds would have to pay about $1500 a month, a small fast turn over restaurant would pay $200 and a convenience store would pay about $90. I've been on the phone with city councilors and staff at least a dozen times in the last two weeks, so have a lot of other people. For the moment the business side of the vote is on hold and maybe it will go to a vote in a general election. Portland usualy supports new taxes to preserve services but at the same time we have voted for a lot of programs in the past few years and the will might not be there for this to pass. The city council might still sneak it by with a council vote and the opinions of local business be damned. Pisses me off that I donated to the campaigns of the guy who pushed this regressive tax forward on more than one occasion.
I'm sure you let his entire staff know that you not only voted, but donated, and gave them an earful. I have zero problem paying for things, as long as the charges are tied to some vague interpretation of reality which isn't the case which your deal rn. I have the exact opposite problem in that I personally wish our Republican legislature out here would raise my taxes and fix our roads, but there was a huge showdown just to keep a minimal level of funding this year compared to what is needed. We just had the worst winter in recorded history stretching back to the 1800's and the potholes are insane. You'd think they'd want to address that, but that's gotta be a battle too because you're not allowed to say anything that could even be remotely reframed as a tax increase.