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Westchester voters approve referendum to correct March vote
Updated: November 7, 2012 6:08PM
WESTCHESTER — Voters have approved a tax referendum that in reality corrects an error from a vote in the March primary.
With all but two of 14 precincts reporting, there were 4,062 votes in favor of a nonhome-rule municipal retailers’ occupation tax and a nonhome-rule municipal occupation tax, compared with 1,955 votes against.
Even though the village passed a nonhome-rule sales tax in the March 20 referendum, Village President Sam Pulia said there was an omission to the language in the referendum box that did not include the service occupation tax.
Village Manager Janet Matthys said the two taxes are part of the sales tax. The two taxes must be passed together in order for sales tax to be enforceable. The retailers occupation tax is tax people pay on goods at a store. An example of the service occupation tax is if someone were getting a new roof put on their house and the roofer would tax the homeowner on materials.
“So we’re going to do it over in its entirety,” Pulia said. “We have not collected anything. It was an oversight, as unfortunate as that is.”
Unlike the first referendum, where the monies were restricted toward public infrastructure and maintenance, this time the funds will also include property tax relief.
