Mayor Ben Cantu admitted it’s been going on two years since he’d paid a City of Manteca business license renewal fee for his land use planning/project design firm.

Cantu said he did it as an experiment to see whether municipal staff is effectively policing business license renewals that carry annual fees typically based on the dollar volume of transactions a concern does in a year.

The mayor’s surprise “confession” was made during Tuesday’s budget workshop conducted at the Manteca Transit Center. The proposed budget is requiring $1.7 million be taken from reserves due to projected revenue shortfalls.

Business licenses and permits account for roughly $900,000 of the $46 million the city needs to cover the cost of day-to-day services such as police and fire services.

Since being elected mayor in 2018, Cantu has occasionally brought up his displeasure at what he believes is the finance department’s failure to stay on top of business license renewals. And as such, the city wasn’t collecting money it was legally entitled to and needed to help cover the cost of providing municipal services.

The city a number of years ago switched to a system where all business licenses expire on June 30 of each year regardless of when they were first issued.

The system is similar to the approach the IRS uses. The federal taxing agency posts deadlines but the responsibility to remember to file taxes falls on individuals as the IRS does not send out reminders.

The business license renewal information and form is posted on the city’s website on the finance department page. For whatever reason, the renewal application was not accessible Tuesday evening.

When fire inspections of businesses are conducted periodically of commercial concerns, firefighters check to make sure there is a business license posted on the premise.

Cantu said he has not had a recent fire inspection of his business.

The business license on the checklist of firefighters is to make sure businesses are properly licensed and current. Fire inspections — depending upon the number of people accessing the facility and the type of hazards invoked with the business — can have different frequencies.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com