Seattle council candidate looks to bring urgency to helping small businesses

Sara Nelson is the co-founder of Fremont Brewing, and she is running for the at-large Seattle City Council seat. She told the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH that she hopes to help better create partnerships between the city and small businesses to address many of the current issues rendered by the pandemic.

“Let’s start with do no harm. So perhaps partnerships — when I say that people think of public-private partnership, but I’m not getting that wonky. What I’m talking about is let’s try to work together. And the first way of doing that is recognizing that businesses need help,” Nelson said. “There will never be enough money to provide grants to all the struggling small businesses that really need them.”

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“But there are things that council could do right now that would help, and these things would not require new revenue sources or divert money from essential services,” she added. “But my concern is that I’m not seeing any urgency on the part of council to really help us.”

Examples of help that Nelson hopes to highlight include extensions on outdoor seating permits, and tax exemptions for emergency grants.

“One example is extend the permits that allow for restaurants to have outdoor seating past October,” she said. “That was great that the city did that, but those expire in October. Let’s keep them going as long as this pandemic lasts and until business, until dining can go back indoors as usual. How about exempting the emergency grants that some businesses have received? … Exempt those from the local tax collection. That way they could spend all of that money keeping their staff hired and the doors open.”

“Better yet, why not just exempt the B&O tax from businesses that are hardest hit, like full service restaurants and entertainment venues, and gyms, etc. So these are targeted measures that would make a big difference right now,” she said. “But it needs to have a council that really cares about businesses and sees that we’re in a crisis. Just look downtown.”

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As Jason noted, the council has passed new taxes during the pandemic, which they’d argue are going after big businesses like Amazon, but small businesses are impacted when Amazon is impacted, especially when they’re moving jobs out of Seattle.

“Well, who gave you the advanced copy of my stump speech?,” Nelson joked in response. “That is the point that I make, that the business community is an ecosystem. And when you go after big business — this whole tax Amazon — it might feel good, but in fact that tax that you’re referring to does capture a lot of other businesses that are being taxed on their gross receipts.”

“But more importantly, there are supply chain partners that are small businesses that are supplying the larger businesses,” she said. “What about the restaurants and bars that people frequent — you know, the employees of those large businesses? So that’s what I mean is: We’re interconnected. And so just levying a tax on big business does have an impact. And right now we need jobs. We need to bring jobs back. We need to keep the jobs that haven’t left. We need to keep them here, and we need to send the right signals right now.”

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here