The City and Borough of Juneau Assembly isn’t making changes to the senior sales tax exemption quite yet.
A proposed ordinance at Monday’s meeting would have expanded the list of exempted items, but the Assembly members voted instead to send it back to the Assembly Finance Committee for reconsideration. This came after the business community expressed concerns about the proposed expansion.
When the Assembly voted in 2015 to restrict the sales tax exemption for seniors, it wrote the ordinance so that seniors would still not pay sales tax on so-called “essential items,” including food, fuel and utilities. The ordinance under consideration Monday would have expanded that list of “essential items” to include items such as toilet paper, soap, laundry detergent and hot food at grocery stores.
CBJ Finance Director Bob Bartholomew estimates that this change will reduce the city’s sales tax revenue by between $30,000 and $90,000. In 2016, Bartholomew said, the narrowing of the senior sales tax exemption as a whole netted the city $1.8 million.
Multiple businesses, including the Juneau Chamber of Commerce, reached out to City Manager Rorie Watt in recent weeks to express their concerns about the ordinance. Mainly, businesses were concerned that this ordinance would not only create for confusion and inconvenience as seniors checked out but it would also require some businesses to file exemption reports with the city that they didn’t have to file before.
The Assembly voted unanimously to send the ordinance back to the Assembly Finance Committee for further consideration. The next meeting of that committee is scheduled for Nov. 8.
• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at 523-2271 or alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com.
