Cape Chamber endorses use tax, vehicle admin fee

The Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce announced its endorsement of passage of the city’s use tax and vehicle administration fee ballot issues. These measures will appear on the ballots April 5 in Cape Girardeau and Jackson.

At the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce First Friday Coffee event, Bob Neff, chairman of the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce board of directors, said the chamber staff fully vets measures and issues considered by the chamber, and issues go through several levels of consideration before they are brought to the board.

“And I just want you to know that that’s what happened in this case,” Neff said at the event. “It was very carefully looked at. It went through the processes, and the chamber board of directors unanimously supported the passage of both of these ballot measures.”

Neff acknowledged his opinion in the matter is not unbiased. As the owner of a local car dealership, the measure affects his business. But “if I didn’t think it was a good issue, I wouldn’t stand up here,” he said,

During the event, city manager Scott Meyer said the ballot measures address issues of economy and public safety in Cape Girardeau.

About the economy, Meyer said the use tax would free up funds to allow for repairs and upgrades to be made to the fields of the Shawnee Sports Complex. The fields, often used for tournaments, he said, need to be improved “to stay competitive and bring a lot of people to our community through those fields.”

The use tax also would reduce the license fee for small businesses to a flat $40 for businesses with between $40,000 and $1 million in revenue, Myer said.

On the subject of public safety, Cape Girardeau police chief Wes Blair said the use tax would fund seven new police officers on the understaffed force and retain three police officers funded by a three-year federal grant.

Blair said the use tax would help the Cape Girardeau Police Department deal with issues of mental health.

“Most of the time, our officers ... are the first line to encounter somebody with a mental-health issue, and unfortunately, a lot of times, it’s when it’s at the crisis level, where they’ve contemplated suicide, or they’re actively attempting something like that, or they’re committing a crime due to their mental illness,” Blair said.

So the department is looking into ways to funnel those with mental-health issues into places where they can get assistance “instead of just incarcerating them,” Blair said. The use tax would help support those programs, he said.

Meyer said the tax also would fund a new fire captain in charge of training and a safety coordinator to reduce workplace safety in the region.

“As citizens, we have an opportunity on April 5, and we have an obligation on April 5,” Cape Girardeau Mayor Harry Rediger said about the two measures. The opportunity “is that we can now find general revenue that will fully fund public safety,” he said. The obligation is to our local car dealers “to be on a level playing field” with dealers outside the state.

“State use tax has been in effect since the late ’50s,” Rediger said. He said Perry, Scott and Cape Girardeau counties all have passed a use tax.

“The city of Cape Girardeau and Jackson are kind of on an island here. So this would complete that cycle of passing the use tax that’s going on across the state,” Rediger said.

The Jackson Area Chamber of Commerce announced its endorsement of the measures earlier this month.

On Wednesday, the Cape Girardeau Fraternal Order of Police Regional Lodge 51 made its support of the use tax known. In a news release, lodge president Doug Hays emphasized the need for more officers.

“These additional patrol officers will help us improve public safety in our city, providing the type of law enforcement we all want for our community,” Hays said.

Opposition to the use tax is organizing. About 15 members of a local tea-party group want to mount a campaign, arguing local governments are overspending and do not need another tax.

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