Errant numbers on business license renewal frighten downtown merchants

Business license renewal notice contains big mistake

David Comstock opened the envelope from the City of Auburn on Thursday morning at his bookstore on East Main Street.

What he found inside was enough to give him a heart attack.

While the notice didn’t induce myocardial infarction, it did speed him, furious, down the block to Auburn City Hall, hot for an answer.

Exactly why, he asked a City permit technician, did he owe the City of Auburn $6,281 to renew his Auburn Business License — a figure based on square footage — 10 times what he should have paid?

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Several years ago, the City tied the business license to the Auburn Downtown Association assessment, but this with the cap set at $1,500 a year?

Turns out it was all a big mistake.

“This was the explanation I finally got,” a much relieved Comstock said upon returning to his business, offending letter in hand, and a revised figure in ink thereon — $686.

“They had written a new program — I don’t know if they changed computers or what the reason was — but the guy had made an error, and the computer took the total for the last 10 years. So the downtown business owners got a 10-year total as the amount that they owe now,” Comstock said.

The City told Comstock it hoped to send out the corrected forms Thursday afternoon.

A quick check of downtown businesses revealed that most owners had not yet received the errant notices in the mail, and because of that their hearts and blood pressure were functioning within normal parameters.

“Apparently, I was the first person to buzz down to City Hall,” Comstock said with a chuckle.

“Good thing,” John Rottle, co-owner of Rottles Apparel and Shoes on East Main Street, said after hearing about the mistake.

“If they were accumulating 10 years worth, it would probably have been time to get a loan. We would have owed $15,000,” Rottle said.

Comstrock said given the current state of the bookstore business, which is rocky, it was a particularly bad time to get such news, false though it turned out to be.

“There’s real bad competition on the Internet, nonprofits that are kind of eating up the bottom of the market. It’s been kind of a rough time. So when I get something like this, I think, oh great, they’re going to try and put us out of business,” Comstock said.

“It was a mistake, and we’re all struggling downtown anyway,” said a relieved Giovanni Di Quattro, owner of the Rainbow Cafe.