The advertised BPOL ordinance exempts businesses at $2 million or less, then taxes all receipts once a business passes it. A restaurant doing $38,500 a week is at the line. The hearing is Sept. 15.
The 2018 Restaurateur of the Year and 2020 VRLTA chairman announced his retirement on August 31. He spent the last years of his tenure making the industry's case in public, on the record, under his own name, and he says he intends to keep doing it.
Virginia's local meals tax is climbing, and the referendum that used to stand in a county's way has been gone since 2020. In Roanoke, unpaid meals tax has produced criminal charges against restaurant owners.