Sales Tax Exemptions & the Coin Laundry Industry
by Brian Wallace, CLA President and CEO
The Coin Laundry Association has adopted the protection of the state sales tax exemptions as its top legislative priority over the past 30 years. In just the last 10 years, the CLA has engaged lobbyists in this effort in Michigan, Maine, Florida, Arkansas, Washington, New Jersey, and now Illinois and Kentucky. Hiring of a lobbyist is usually the last step in the process, which begins with legislative monitoring.
The CLA tracks all bills in all 50 states, looking for any adverse legislation. We also monitor all federal legislation as well as all state and federal regulatory activity looking for any movement that could be detrimental to our industry. Between legislative monitoring and the engagement of lobbyists, the CLA has spent nearly $250,000 in the past decade to protect the industry in this way.
For 2010, we will be launching a national campaign to raise awareness and solicit donations from the industry to support our efforts to protect the sales tax exemptions. You can imagine that this is an expensive effort and the CLA does not have the budget to fund lobbyists on its own.
For those of you in directly affected states, I encourage you to respond to upcoming solicitations for donations. For those of you in states not yet affected, please consider contributing to this effort by joining the association and/or making a donation to our efforts.
There is strength in numbers and, while this will be a particularly challenging period for our industry, it is time to band together and protect our businesses. Remember, the average laundry owner will be paying at least $8,000 to $12,000 per store per year in sales tax to their respective states if the exemption is lost.
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Laundromats provide a necessary service to those who have no laundry facilities at home. Generally, these are the poorer families in our society. They are often struggling to make ends meet and cannot afford to pay Sales Tax on washing their clothes. At the same time, middle to upper income families who have their own laundry equipment within their home would not be charged Sales Tax when they wash their family's clothes.
Washing clothes is an activity that promotes health and well-being. It is not an optional service like washing a car is. All families must be treated equally when they perform this necessary task. Taxing only the poor makes a Sales Tax on laundromats a regressive tax and that goes against everything America stands for.
Larry Adamski
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I've owned self serve car washes in PA for over 20 years and paid my share in sales tax with most other states exempting the tax. Our state wants to lower the overall sales tax, but repeal and include 75 other industries namely coin op laundry. From my prospective, sharing the burden of sales tax over more industries would help me if the state lowers the overall tax by 2%. We all have to pay our fair share one time or another. If I did not have to pay sales tax for the past 30 + years it would have been great. In our businesses, we are not able to add the tax to the purchases, we would have to take it on the chin for each dollar earned. That has been the car wash industries stance for years as it being an unfair tax. I do not see the tax for my industry ever "going" away. Eventually, I think most transactions will include some kind of sales tax in the future whether we like it or not.
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