Aldermen voted unanimously at Saturday’s budget workshop not to create a local food and beverage tax because of projections of higher-than-expected tax revenues in the next fiscal year.
The proposed city budget, posted online in January, floated the idea of a 1 percent tax on food and beverages to pay for a nearly $3 million increase in city services.
The proposal met with resistance from local restaurant owners, and some told The Daily the tax would discourage new restaurants from moving to the city.
Saturday’s vote indicated aldermen agreed.
“Creating new taxes to tax an industry that is doing well and bringing people to Evanston is not necessarily a happy development for them,” Ald. Edmund Moran (6th) said Sunday. “I don’t look upon it as happy development for Evanston if it ends up discouraging people from doing that.”
Moran said the city is projecting more sales and income tax than planned and could fill budget gaps without creating a local food tax.
Aldermen also allocated about $300,000 in building permit fees from Sherman Plaza construction to help fund an elm tree inoculation program, Moran said. An additional $700,000 in fees would go to street planning and construction.
Evanston City Council must approve the 2005-06 budget by March 1, the beginning of the next fiscal year.
Alderman also received updated costs for proposed Dutch elm disease inoculations for the city’s elm trees, but no action was taken.
If the city opts to inoculate all 3,299 parkway elm trees — trees that are on public property — it will cost $2.5 million over the next three years. That is higher than the $1.1 million cost the city had predicted in September.
The vaccine, Arbotect, is 98 percent effective. The new figure from city staff assumes that 2 percent of elm trees will have to be cut down with city dollars even if they are inoculated. The city also would have to set aside nearly $300,000 each year to ensure it has money for future inoculations on a three-year cycle.
“If we vote to inoculate, we commit to a lifetime of every three years injecting these trees,” said Ald. Ann Rainey (8th). “This is one we wouldn’t be able to renege on.”
Rainey said she wants an ordinance that would require homeowners with elm trees on their property to inoculate against the disease.
Homeowners are required to take down infected elm trees. Ald. Arthur Newman (1st) said requiring homeowners to inoculate a tree is no different than making them take it down.
“The idea that we can require a homeowners to cut down a tree,” he said, “but not inoculate it sounds like absurdity.”
The Daily’s Maridel Reyes and Paul Thissen contributed to this report.
Reach Mike Cherney at [email protected].
