Tax Refund -- Atherton Style...

Watch Dog has unearthed another bit of information to add to the "News Buried During a Holiday Week" file. (The file already includes these two items from the County Controller (12/24 and 12/31) as well as this piece of bad news from Visa USA's local Foster City office from 12/30.)

This time, however, the buried news is in Atherton…

Ah…Atherton. Such a beautiful town. Of course the smaller the town the more cut throat politics can be. Watch Dog has covered this all before in great detail here, here, here, and here. And by far, Watch Dog gets more emails per resident from Atherton than any other city or town in the area. And I have little doubt that by posting this bit of news today, I will open myself up to a flood of nasty, backstabbing (yet informative) emails…which I love.

Here is the buried news:

The Town of Atherton will be issuing refunds to people who have been overcharged on business license taxes. This is one of the issues in the John Johns fiasco the Town has been dealing with forever. For you astute readers, this is the also the issue that Town Councilmember Charles Marsala emailed consistuents about in October -- warning that if they think they are due money to hurry up and get in line. It looks like Marsala was right...but don’t expect this to be the end of this saga. If Watch Dog has learned one thing over the course of the past six months it is that the issues around John Johns departure never go away...

That is the newsy part of the story -- but why was it buried?...

You see, the Town Council actually decided to refund these fees/taxes on December 17th. The Almanac just posted this story about refunding taxes to businesses on December 30th.

Why was there a two-week delay in getting this information out to residents?

Not only that, this is stuff that affects a lot of folks -- so why bury this story on December 30th?

This all seems fishy to Watch Dog...but I assume I'll hear from all sides of this issue shortly...stay tuned.