Cupertino employee tax may still get to 2018 ballot

City will reach out to business owners, residents to find consensus on plan

Cupertino voters may get a chance to weigh in this year on whether to change the way the city taxes businesses after all.

Like Mountain View, Cupertino is considering imposing an employee tax on Apple and other businesses in the city. The question is whether to hold a special election next year or wait until 2020, but it appears the first option is too expensive and the second will require a long wait.

After first deciding to postpone the issue, the city’s elected officials have now decided to do outreach this month with the business community, come up with a solid plan for how to spend the revenue, and get residents to weigh in on the proposal. The council will then reconvene on July 31 to decide once and for all whether to put the proposal on the 2018 ballot. That means a tax that could generate $10 million for the city toward transportation solutions still has a fighting chance of going before voters this year.

The first few times the proposal came up for discussion, Councilman Barry Chang argued the city’s chronic traffic problems won’t be going away anytime soon so the sooner the city finds ways to help alleviate it, the better.

“If we don’t do it now, I think it will be too late,” he said at the July 3 council meeting. “If we don’t do it this year, next year the cost is too high.”

Cupertino Mayor Darcy Paul, who attended the Mountain View City Council meeting last month

to throw his support behind that city’s business tax proposal, once again suggested his city take a restrained approach.

“With regard to being able to bring it back in four weeks, I’m highly skeptical you’ll be making too many in-roads,” he said. “I think a transit plan, if we’re talking about something that can cost up to $2 billion to do appropriately, at a very minimum, is something that would require a little

more than four weeks of time.”

Paul’s colleagues Savita Vaidhyanathan and Steven Scharf, who have been supportive of the tax but had concerns about rushing it, seemed more receptive to putting it on the 2018 ballot at the July 3 meeting. Both said they recently met with Apple representatives, with Vaidhyanathan suggesting that her meeting was “very positive” and that she found Apple willing to work with the city.

“Doing it in 2019, to me it doesn’t make much sense, because we are just spending more of our tax dollars,”

she said. “So I don’t see the point of doing it in 2019. If we want to do it we’d make it more urgent to do it in 2018.”

Vice Mayor Rod Sinks did not take part in the discussions. He has recused himself in past conversations about the head tax because his wife works for Apple.

The city is forming an ad hoc committee to study the tax proposal this month. Among other members, it will include Chang and Scharf who volunteered to join the committee.