Vancouver councillor suggests mobile small business licences
Posted January 11, 2013 7:48 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Vancouver is the latest city to look at mobile licences as a way to save small business owners money, paperwork, and headaches.
“A plumber who is doing repairs in Burnaby one day and Vancouver the next needs two business licences, one for Vancouver and one for Burnaby,” says councillor Geoff Meggs. “That’s double the fees, paperwork done in each municipality and so on.”
Meggs will ask city staff to look at an alternative at next week’s council meeting.
It’s an idea Vancouver Board of Trade Director of Public Policy Kareem Allam supports. “For a lot of small businesses that perform services across jurisdictional boundaries, which is the majority of them, the compliance cost of having to get a licence in every community is onerous.”
“There are 21 municipalities in the region; 21 licences times anywhere from $100 to $300? That’s a huge burden,” he argues.
Earlier this month, nine municipalities in the Fraser Valley started a year-long pilot project that will offer mobile business licences.
Allam doesn’t expect any one city will lose money on the venture because they will have to share the fees they collect with their neighbours.
“A few years ago in the Okanagan-Similkameen area, municipalities got together and created one licence for the region and they tried it out as a pilot,” says Allam. “What they found was the revenues actually went up because people suddenly started purchasing their business licences and started complying with the legislation because there was now a reasonable reason for them to do so.”
Meggs says there are still some issues that need to be worked out. “If you have, for example, someone who is doing carpet cleaning across municipal boundaries, they may improperly dispose of their cleaning fluids in one municipality.”
“We have to make sure everyone is working up to the same standards when three or four municipalities are doing the oversight and the enforcement. So, there are some design issues and there are some businesses where it’s probably not appropriate and it’s not as simple as just saying let’s merge the licences. But it can be done and I’m trying to bring it forward and get it happening this year.”
Meggs adds the city has been working on this for months.
