Montgomery business owners say they’re frustrated trying to renew their city licenses
Business owners in Montgomery say they’ve had major problems trying to renew their licenses this month.
“It’s been very frustrating. I’ve been calling for two weeks. Nobody answers the phone. Only one time was I able to leave a voicemail. Nobody ever called me back,” business owner Rusty Taylor told Action 8 News.
Every January, Taylor receives forms in the mail from the city. He fills them out and mails them with a check to pay for his business license. But this year was different.
“The number of employees of your business and the codes determine how much your business license is. You can’t complete it without the city’s assistance for some reason this year. I don’t know why. So I had no choice but to come down here or I’m not going to have a license,” he said.
Taylor finally got his license three hours later.
He’s not alone with his frustrations. Carol Jones had to go down to the city office twice in two days to try to get a license for her new daycare business. Each time, she says the wait has been several hours.
“Being a senior citizen, it seems like there should be some kind of policy where they would allow us to come in and we will get privileged, but no no,” Jones said.
According to a spokesperson with the City of Montgomery, the license and revenue division in the process of changing business license software. Because of that, the usual code and type of license fields were not pre-printed on the business license renewal forms sent out this year, which is why thousands of Montgomery business owners must speak to someone in the license and revenue office to get help calculating the amount they owe.
“There were issues this year because with our software, it was not an easy conversion. There had to be a lot of testing, retesting, working through bugs and all. In fact, we didn’t even get it up and have it ready to go until almost the end of December,” Bob Taylor with the City of Montgomery said.
The City of Montgomery has extended the deadline for business licenses to February 21.
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