Vacant buildings throughout the Tower District in Fresno could soon be filled with new businesses as part of a proposed program with the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Fresno City Council established a pilot program on Thursday to incentivize commercial jobs within vacant buildings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The big picture: The pilot program, which was proposed by Councilwoman Annalisa Perea, will provide sales tax rebates to local businesses that fill vacant buildings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To be eligible, businesses must have no more than 75 employees and not be part of a larger chain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Eligible businesses will fill storefronts that have been vacant for at least one month and have at least a two-year lease moving forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By the numbers: Businesses would receive a local sales tax rebate of 50% of the city\u2019s share.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The pilot program would provide a maximum of $375,000 in rebates during its one-year lifespan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Go deeper: Smoke shops would not be eligible to participate in the program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The city announced on Wednesday that local smoke shops have dropped their lawsuit against the city\u2019s new ordinance that regulates them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
City officials said inspections have uncovered various illegal activities taking place at smoke shops across the city, including selling flavored tobacco products and cannabis to minors.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vacant buildings throughout the Tower District in Fresno could soon be filled with new businesses as part of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":["post-82629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fresno","tag-fresno","tag-fresno-headlines","tag-fresno-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}