At the City Council meeting on February 12, 2015, Mayor Jim Clement wanted to discuss and consider placing the removal of the VIA sales tax up for election on the May 2015 ballot.
The City Council had placed the 1/2% VIA sales tax on the November 2014 ballot last year and voters decided to keep the tax.
Related: City Council creates illegal amount of sales tax
The Council asked Clement if VIA provided service to anyone in the city. Clement replied
We mentioned that we needed input from the community from anyone sitting on this dais or you people in the audience, that they would talk to their neighbors and so forth… I found one.
The city has never officially sent out any communications about the VIA issue.
In January of 2015, Alderman Earnest Gay had given a speech to the Texas Public Policy Foundation and had said in the speech that members of the City Council were looking into why people voted for keeping the VIA tax. Gay had said “Because VIA does not provide us with any service.”
At the February 12 meeting, however, Gay changed his stance on VIA and said
If we hurt 1 person by doing that then we haven’t done the community any service.
The cost of placing the item on the ballot was brought up by Council members and was it decided that it wasn’t worth spending the money to have another election for something that the voters had already decided on.
The VIA sales tax represents 25% of the total amount of sales tax the city could potentially collect.
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