BERLIN — The Town of Berlin took one step closer to adopting its first-ever licensing ordinance for businesses on Monday, holding a required first reading of the new 21-page ordinance draft ahead of its expected final approval at the council’s June 20 regular meeting.

The ordinance will establish an across-the-board fee, currently set by the State of Alabama at $12 per year, for any business generating receipts within Berlin. With a small handful of exceptions, most businesses currently operating in Berlin fall under the broad category designated in the ordinance as “Schedule A,” which covers most providers of retail goods and services, as well as most types of manufacturing.

Businesses that fall under the broad Schedule A category will be assessed an annual licensing fee that collects .0005 of all an entity’s gross receipts over the course of a fiscal year. In the case of a Schedule A business that generates $100,000 in annual gross receipts in a given year, for instance, the town would collect $50.

Businesses of other types are covered (and assessed) according to a sorted schedule extending through the remaining letters of the alphabet, though Berlin doesn’t currently host businesses that fall under most of those remaining categories.

Berlin mayor Patrick Bates noted the council agreed to set most business licensing fees low, signaling that the town’s intent in adopting the fee structure isn’t to generate municipal funds, but rather to codify, four years into Berlin’s existence, a standardized set of requirements that current and future businesses can refer to.

“This isn’t being done for the purposes of revenue; it’s being done for the purposes of activating some aspects of state law that we need to have in place as a town,” he explained. “In our ordinance, we’ve consolidated everything down that we could into one single schedule. Really, the remaining schedules are for exceptional classes of businesses, or ones that the state requires a separate schedule for, or ones where a gross receipt schedule doesn’t fit the business — like distribution centers or warehouses.”

In other business at its regular meeting, the council:

• Held a public hearing on a proposed agreement between Berlin Hardware and the town in anticipation of seeking grant funds to address a drainage issue near the business’ location at the intersection of U.S. Highway 278 and County Road 747. The town intends to seek $17,000 in grant funds to cover the estimated $25,000 cost of the proposed project, with the business agreeing to pay any overage cost in excess of $17,000. No one spoke for or against the project during the hearing.
• Held a public hearing on, and subsequently approved, a proposed minor subdivision along County Road 1615 to be named Berlin Acres. The development will consist of four brick single-family homes on lots of approximately .38 acres each. The developer made himself available for questions during the hearing, though no one spoke in opposition to the project.
• Approved the annexation into the town limits of two contiguous pieces of private property, totaling approximately 8 acres, along County Road 1605.
• Adopted a fee structure for public records requests involving paper hard copies and transfers to digital devices. Under the fee structure, persons and entities requesting municipal records will be required to pay a $1 per-page fee for black-and-white copies; $2 per page for color copies, $1 per page for electronic transfers of paginated documents, $15 for transfer of files onto digital media, and $30 per hour (or $7.50 per quarter hour) for research requested of the town clerk. Bates noted that all municipal ordinances, resolutions, meeting minutes, and other public meeting records can be accessed and printed at a user’s leisure, for free, by accessing the town’s website (

berlinal.org

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• Set a public hearing for the council’s next regular meeting on June 20 to solicit comment from residents concerning recreational additions, enhancements, and proposed park and rec amenities under consideration for future installment on municipal property near the Berlin Town Hall.
• Approved the minutes of the council’s April 18 regular meeting.