The City of Santa Ana is facing bankruptcy in five years, when $30 million in local sales taxes go offline – part of a decrease in Measure X , the sales tax approved in 2018 that has financed all the recent program expansions, according to the Voice of OC .
Of course the Santa Ana City Council Members are in a panic. One of them, Johnathan Hernandez, says we can fix this by hosting MMA fights. LOL!
Hernandez’ council ally, Benjamin Vazquez, says the city should make a revenue generating committee to come up with ways to bring money into the city.
City Councilman Phil Bacerra said the city needs to start looking at ways to generate revenue and Mayor Valerie Amezcua agrees that the city needs to generate revenue.
However none of our Council Members are addressing why so many businesses are opting to open in cities other than Santa Ana!
The Rose Institute conducted a Cost of Doing Business Survey in Orange County back in 2018. They found that the City of Santa Ana had a high cost of doing business. Santa Ana ranked 26 out of 28 cities in regard to the cost of business licenses and 20 out of 28 cities with regard to cost of property taxes.
Councilman Bacerra says that he was able to convince the City to stop requiring Certificates of Occupancy, which used to be mandated for all new businesses even if they were not doing anything that would require a building permit. That brought Santa Ana inline with all other Orange County cities.
However our city remains more expensive to do business in. On top of that we charge the highest sales taxes and, because our voters keep approving bond measures, we have the highest property taxes in Orange County as well.
If Santa Ana wants to dig out of its financial sinkhole it will have to start by being more business friendly. Hernandez and Vazquez don’t get that and likely never will.
When was the last time a major business opened up in Santa Ana? All we see is closures and bankruptcies.
Dutch Bros. just opened to huge fanfare in Fountain Valley. They are already looking at opening many more new coffee shops in Orange county – but not in Santa Ana…