Cupertino’s City Council tonight will consider what kind of restructured business tax it might place on November’s ballot for Apple Inc.’s headquarters city.
The move comes as nearby Mountain View looks like it’s headed toward referendum to place a “head tax” on Alphabet’s Google and other large employers in its boundaries. Public polling in Cupertino has indicated heavy support for something similar there. Such a tax would mostly hit Apple, by far Cupertino’s largest employer.
Just a week ago, the City Council in Seattle — headquarters to Amazon.com — repealed a controversial head tax that it had put on the books just a few weeks earlier, after opposition from Amazon and others in the business community.
No such public threats have been made in Mountain View, but the Cupertino Chamber of Commerce posted a no jobs tax message on Twitter on Friday and sent out a press release quoting its president, Andrew Walters, calling for no such measure in November’s election.
The impetus for this budding movement in prosperous, tech-dominated cities is the belief that the traffic congestion and housing shortages in those places is due to tech growth, Cupertino Vice Mayor Rod Sinks recently told the Business Journal.
But although no one from Cupertino’s chamber would comment on the record, the organization’s opposition stems from the fact that the tax revenue the city hopes to gain is not restricted to specific projects that would address transportation issues that the chamber sees as most critical, the Business Journal was told.
Tonight’s meeting will be to decide what kind of tax — head tax (based on the number of a company’s employees), payroll tax or an expansion of Cupertino’s existing square-footage tax — might be proposed.
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