It’s not often that a municipal government calls a special meeting yet takes no action. But nothing is precisely what transpired last week at a special meeting of the Berlin Town Council, after the town’s elected leaders decided against raising in-town sales taxes.

The June 2 meeting fielded only one agenda topic: the consideration of a proposed ordinance to raise Berlin’s municipal sales taxes by half a cent.

At the council’s regular May meeting, Mayor Patrick Bates previously had alerted the council that a legislative push to reduce Alabama’s grocery tax could incidentally tie local governments’ hands in changing their own municipal sales taxes, if the version of the state bill then under consideration were to take effect by Sept. 1 of this year.

Rather than act in May on a potential sales tax increase whose final form hadn’t yet passed through the legislature, though, the council at that time agreed to wait and watch how the state bill’s fate would unfold.

Because of the way the bill was written at the time, the council originally had eyed early June as a narrow time window for taking action on possibly locking in a local sales tax increase — or else, per language in the bill, risk foregoing any future opportunity to raise taxes locally without a making an appeal to the legislature.

The final version of grocery tax bill, though, removed the statewide tax decrease’s Sept. 1 effective date in favor of one that begins as soon as Gov. Kay Ivey signs the now-approved state measure into law. That left Bates and the council with the decision of either immediately raising Berlin’s sales taxes with no pressing local incentive to do so, or else abandoning the idea — at least for now — altogether.

No one on the council had expressed any desire to raise local taxes when Bates presented the issue in May, including Bates himself. “I really didn’t think this was something we’d be talking about this year,” he said at the time, adding that he had no desire to propose a sales tax increase simply to beat an arbitrary state deadline.

“I just didn’t want to let this pass and there be no discussion on it” locally, said Bates. With no action taken at last week’s special council meeting, sales taxes in Berlin will indeed remain unchanged.