Jake Robinson (left), Dan Wilson and the Small Business Alliance of Rutherford County say the City of Murfreesboro's attitude of inconsistent enforcement of codes, ordinances, fees and taxes needs to change
A group of small business owners have joined forces to fight what they call a culture of over-regulation and an absence of common sense in local government.
Members of the recently formed Small Business Alliance of Rutherford County say the fees, ordinances, taxes and regulations placed on small businesses are getting out of control, and the City of Murfreesboro as an entity seems concerned with collecting money and regulating every step of the process more so than truly helping business prosper, more concerned with aesthetics and conformation than keeping safe and sanitary conditions.
“It should be ‘what can I help you do to open your business,'” says Jake Robinson, director of the Small Business Alliance of Rutherford County. “That’s where they get their revenue. They should be trying to help them.”
However, a common theme among Murfreesboro business seems to be “The City is getting in the way of me doing business.”
Dan Wilson has operated a fencing supply store on Old Fort Parkway for 20 years in a building that was there long before the highway was widened to its current state. He has since added a hot sauce retail store to the location, but when he wanted to serve food restaurant style, that change of use would require him to invest thousands in paving his gravel parking lot, among meeting other requirements, even though Wilson was there before this property was annexed into the city.
Another business owner who has spent money developing property for a business says she is now communicating with and trying to follow the guidelines of the building and codes department, the water and sewer department, the fire marshal, the planning and engineering department, and sometimes getting conflicting or confusing information from various ones.
“The coordination between codes and planning doesn’t exist,” she said. “They are two separate entities.”
While in the process of fencing the property, she said she heard from various departments’ staff that wooden poles are flammable and shouldn’t be used, that the front must match the back, that a certain plan is fine but the materials are a problem, or one may be able to put wood in, if she does these particular things. Or that grass is a fire hazard.
“After six months of trying to get a fence built, I get the information that says there are no regulations on fences under 8 feet tall, nor the materials, nor decking under a certain square footage,” the entrepreneur said.
“We want all of the codes online, and static,” Wilson said. “From stories we hear, who you are is as important as what has to be done in order to pass codes. We don’t mind codes, but they should be the same for everybody.
“They just make it up as they go, no one has to prove anything,” he said.
Many of the comments made on the fencing plans around the new business turned out to be no more than an individual’s opinion on what it should look like, not necessarily legally sound pieces of information.
“Their opinions should stay to themselves,” she said. “Is this system of impact fees and jumping through hoops something that you would say supports small business?”
Standing in the way of a business opening just delays its ability to employ people and pay taxes, many say. This particular business owner and many others, do not want to be identified as they are going through approval processes with the city for fear of being singled out or picked on, but are still getting involved with the Small Business Alliance (as the Murfreesboro Pulse and its publisher have).
Dan Wilson, Jake Robinson and Tim Davis discuss how local government can help small business thrive, rather than getting in the way of commerce
Another business owner decided to place her business outside of the city limits after a denied rezoning request.
“We were ready to work with the City in any way necessary; however we discovered it was not a two-way street,” said Dawna Kinne Magliacano. “We own property on Medical Center Boulevard; we tried to get it rezoned commercial and were in the process of renovating the house and making it into an art gallery, gift shop and cafe.
“The zoning board would not let us go commercial, the main reason we were told was that the ‘City’ wants a developer to come in and develop our lot as well as two more deep and the length of the block and the next block as well, all at once into one more of those retail strip malls that are popping up everywhere and sit full of empty storefronts because that is the image they want Murfreesboro to project; they don’t want individual lots rezoning commercial along what is called the Gateway Overlay portion of Medical Center Boulevard.”
This zoning issue, along with required 25′ easement for landscaping and “a 77-page document about the kind of sign you can or cannot have” caused her to find a location out of the city limits.
“I wonder how many other small businesses are being pushed to the outskirts of our community in order to do business,” Magliacano said. It’s very hard for a new small business to get started in Murfreesboro. The funds you need to meet the city’s codes and regulations are not accessible to most mom-and-pop start-ups.”
One would think the City of Murfreesboro would want as much commerce and employment as possible, they would want the maximum number of businesses operating, employing, collecting tax revenue, many business people say.
“Small businesses employ 80 percent of the people in this country, yet we bend over backwards for WalMart and Amazon,” said Tim Davis, the owner of Salt and Pepper Christian Stores, and the SBARC’s treasurer. “Small business is the backbone of our country.”
However, the City of Murfreesboro has a pattern of placing obstacles in front of start up businesses, rather than the attitude of wanting to help them thrive, according to Robinson.
“They have this short-term ‘I need my payoff now’ mentality,” he said. “Would you rather have a candy bar now, or five candy bars later? . . . The mentality of a child is to take the one now.”
Everyone wants a beautiful, safe city, “but when the City government is being called the Murfreesboro Mafia, something is horribly wrong,” Robinson said.
Owner of Cornerstone SCUBA, Jeff Parnell, says an ill-timed letter informing him he had “outside inventory in a non-designated area” dealt a severe blow to his business.
Parnell said he had verbal approval that he could display iron artwork outside of his retail business on Robert Rose Boulevard and had even widened his sidewalk plan to make sure everything was in order. Then, after a few years of selling the iron and it becoming a sizable chunk of Cornerstone’s business, “the City effectively shut it down.”
“It cost me the expenses of site plans, fees to the city and a lost season of selling it,” Parnell said. “I was told the planning department had received ‘numerous complaints’ about it, but I’d never gotten a complaint personally.”
The action of forcing the removal of the products kept a Murfreesboro business from doing perfectly legitimate business.
“People like having somewhere to go to look at that sort of thing; now they’ve driven away shoppers to Nashville and Bell Buckle and other locations to shop for ironwork,” Parnell said.
“We have heard many horror stories; it’s frustrating,” Robinson said.
His group’s concerns do not stop with the regulations and fees placed on businesses within the City of Murfreesboro. Members also raise concern in regard to Rutherford County’s Comprehensive Zoning Plan, and subsequent proposed zoning ordinances still in the public comment phase, that if passed would limit most properties outside of the Murfreesboro/Smyrna/LaVergne/Eagleville City Limits to one home per acre, rather than three, decimating these property values in the rural areas; allows heavy industrial mining and quarries within 200 feet of residential property (the current setback is 1500 feet); and requires certain property owners to set aside and maintain “open space.”
From top, Danny Brandon, Eddie Smotherman and Ricky Turner are all running for city council seats this spring, with the backing of the SBARC
Rutherford County Regional Planning Commission will hold its next work session to review public comments about proposed zoning resolutions for land-use regulations outside city limits during a meeting that will start at 6 p.m., Feb. 13, in the County Commission meeting room on the second floor of the County Courthouse on the Public Square in Murfreesboro. The Small Business Alliance encourages all residents to get involved and come to this meeting on Feb 13 and find out how these changes will effect your individual property rights.
“People just need to wake up and be involved,” Wilson said.
He has done just that, get involved, and he’s organizing others in the new very open and loose group of local business people.
“There’s no cost to join us; our group is non-partisan,” Wilson said.
While the group is open to anyone interested in protecting property rights, regardless of political persuasion, it now has the very specific immediate goal of electing Ricky Turner, Danny Brandon and Eddie Smotherman to the Murfreesboro City Council. The Small Business Alliance vetted the five challengers who have entered the race. The current SBARC members were able to hear each candidate make their case as to who will represent small business, local busines and citizens best at the Murfreesboro City Council. SBARC members voted and chose the three candidates as their “top choice” to put their support behind. All three are small business owners; Turner owns Cedar Bucket Restaurant, Brandon (a Murfreesboro resident) owns American Financial & Accounting (in Manchester), and Smotherman owns Gem in the Box.
“Really, our intention is to establish a voice in the City Council to put small, local business on the same footing as an Amazon,” Wilson said.
He says the decision to give Amazon a $15 million tax break (voted ob by the Rutherford County Industrial Development Board), while taxing the small businesses is inconsistent and detrimental to the local economy and business environment. If all things were fair and equal then every business and landowner in the area should have been given a tax cut, Small Business Alliance leadership said.
“If you take all the entities that fall into the small business category and added up the total number of employees it would far exceed the few ‘Big Businesses’ and their employee count,” Robinson said. “We want to create a level playing field, a small-business-friendly environment.
“If they can afford to give one huge company a break, they should apply that idea to everyone; divide the amount (of Amazon’s effective tax break) among every land owner and cut their taxes accordingly,” Robinson said. Though he said this is unlikely—the city and county can not waive property taxes for everyone—so the simple way to “level the playing field” would be to have Amazon pay their share of taxes like everyone else.
“How many fees and regulations are waived for huge corporations?” one local businessperson asks. “Yet who has a problem paying them? The small business owners.”
Murfreesboro City Council elections are April 17; the deadline to register is March 19, so get registered and get involved. Early voting will run March 28 through April 12.
Business owners who would like to join and anyone wanting more information on the Small Business Alliance of Rutherford County can contact the group at sbarctn@gmail.com or (615) 656-7221.
