Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Joplin City Council Informal Meeting for Monday, December the first, twenty twenty five.

We have two items on the agenda this evening.

The number one item is electric vehicle charging station update.

Good evening, Mrs.

Hoss.

Good evening, Mayor, Council.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.

All right.

So as you all know, uh we did the biannual user fee review in the summer.

Uh we presented that to you uh at the work budget work sessions in September.

Uh one of the new uh recommended fees uh was a business license fee for electric vehicle charging stations.

And at that meeting, you all asked to, or following that meeting, you all asked to uh have some further discussion on uh the proposed fee.

So I want to give you a little background.

Under in Missouri, under the Hancock provisions, uh cities are allowed to recover our costs for providing specific services to specific users.

Uh however, under the handcock provisions, uh cities are not allowed to recover more than our cost for for providing that service, and we can't assess any type of tax without a vote of the people.

Also in Joplin by ordinance, our user fees are required to be evaluated at least on a biannual basis.

That evaluation that we do includes a review of the cost of providing the service and a fee comparison to other cities or like organizations.

Uh charges for specific municipal services should recover most or all of the related cost of providing the service so that the general taxpayer isn't uh supporting services for specific users.

So that's one thing, but it also charges uh also should be set at a level as to continue to attract businesses, contractors, and residents to our community uh versus choosing another city.

So it's it's not an exact science.

Uh we try to land somewhere in there where we're uh competitive uh but recovering our costs.

So we had proposed um a fee uh based on our business license gross receipts table.

So I wanted to provide what that table is.

Uh and uh this is that table.

So it's $30, and then it goes up as sales go up.

So if you have sales of $10,000, the fee would be $30.

If you have sales of $30,000, the fee would be $38.

If you have sales of $50,000, uh the fee would be $46,000.

So those are just examples of how the table works.

Uh if you'll recall, uh, the City of Independence is one of the only other cities that we found that assesses this fee, and they do it also based on gross receipts, but they have a minimum fee of $75.

Our minimum fee is $30.

Um, as a reminder, our cost uh for licensing charging stations is about $263, uh, which covers one inspection each by the fire by fire and building, uh administrative services by planning and zoning for the zoning review, and administrative services by the finance department.

Um since this is a new fee, we don't know what gross receipts for charging stations will be locally.

Uh I don't really even have any examples from other places, so I can't really give you a feel uh for what it will look like.

But um if we would like to recover more of the costs, uh we have a couple of different options for you all to consider.

Uh we can set it as a flat fee.

A lot of our business license fees are a flat fee, and uh we could do 200.

Or we could still do it under the gross receipts calculation with a minimum fee of 200.

So we do set the minimum fee on certain businesses higher, and we could do that here.

The benefit of doing this option is if they have sales so much in sales that would take them above the 200 dollars, then we could still collect that.

So uh these these are the two options uh that uh I came up with I'm just really looking for direction from city council, and if I get direction tonight, then I would bring it back to you in an ordinance at the next council meeting, which would be effective April 1st for the new business license year.

So with that, I'd be happy to open it up to answer any questions.

Council, Mayor.

Dr.

Farnum.

Uh so just quick question.

Um so uh if the gross receipts um method was selected, um, how would that be determined by the company self-report or would their electricity usage be utilized to uh determine that number?

So all businesses, most of our business license fees are based on grocery seats, and the businesses have to report that to us.

It's self-reporting.

Thank you, Leslie.

Thank you, Mayor.

Mrs.

Carlin.

Couple of quick questions.

So when you say we have EV charging station inspections, each by the fire in the building, administrative services, to the cost of 2632 per year, is that correct?

That's per location.

So each how many times are they inspected?

Yeah, they will only do once a year.

Okay.

So each year per location or per, like what if there's like 10 of them right there?