Comment by prostoalex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prostoalex | Hacker News Reader

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> It is absolutely insane that there is so much wealth being generated by these companies, yet they seemingly have no political will to influence the very localities they are based in

Wealth != municipal revenue. Menlo Park was particularly upset that Sun Microsystems (selling hardware and generating sales tax) was replaced by Facebook (no sales tax revenues). A pizza parlor would generate more revenue for the city, seems like, than an Internet company.

The only other venue is for company employees to buy up residential real estate, start paying property taxes and show up for city council meetings, as the city is likely deriving significant revenue from that. But if that is not happening, we can assume that company employees chose to deploy their residential spending elsewhere, and if so, why should the city care?

Does Menlo Park not have property tax for corporate headquarters?

Yeah, I think every city does, but like anything in property tax land, it's the value of land and additions. So a bunch of office buildings plus cheap land by the Bay.

I tried to find an exact answer, but San Mateo county doesn't publish a list of largest property taxpayers (some do http://ttc.ocgov.com/proptax/toptaxpayers so I believe it's public records), and a search for variants of Hacker Way on their site doesn't yield much.

Those places look like they ought to be valued really highly, but I suppose it's probably not a huge amount compared to tens of thousands of houses.

This article seems to imply it was assessed at $355 mil http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_16037583 With new building Facebook erected it will likely get re-assessed at higher value, but still, there are probably residential blocks in Menlo Park valued higher.

Business property taxes and many other services tend to be considerably cheaper than residential rates.

And furthermore - if employees do buy up residential real estate, they now have an incentive against rezoning to allow higher density (and increasing supply -> potentially lowing the value of the very expensive assets they just purchased)

At that time, wasn't it commonplace for manufacturers (ie. Sun) to only pay municipal sales tax on items sold within the city and not for "remote" orders?

It must have been all California sales. They were top sales tax producer for the city http://www.almanacnews.com/news/2009/05/27/menlo-park-a-top-...

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