COMMA CAPER RESOLVED: Bill versus Goliath battle settled.
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Bill Connell, 55, is a partly deaf Viet Nam era veteran who has been in a 16-year battle against California bureaucrats over an 1872 law that exempts disabled veterans saying disabled veterans may peddle “without payment of any license, tax, or fee whatsoever.” The State bureaucrats said the comma after “license” was a mistake and therefore Bill owns taxes, and he had to pay up. Bill wouldn’t hear it.
Now Bill, a onetime heavyweight boxer who claims to have been on the cusp of fighting Larry Holmes, is no pushover nor is he belligerent but he doesn’t give up either and this week he won his David versus Goliath fight.. California’s State tax bureaucrats quit admitting he and other disabled veterans are entitled to the exemptions and can run one person businesses peddling tee-shirts, sundries and in his case hot dogs.
The cork in the bottle is a law signed by Governor Schwarzenegger that cleared up the comma caper and allows disabled veterans to hawks their wares.
Connell is known far and wide as the “Hot Dog Man.” Bill sells his hot dogs from a sparkling clean red stand parked on a dead end off of a south bound exit ramp of Highway One a mile or so south of the tiny beach side town of Carpentaria within spitting distance of the Santa Barbara-Ventura County line. Locals and travelers stop by to kibbutz and munch two dollar hot dogs without paying the 8% sales tax.
In addition to the comma controversy The Franchise Tax Board contended that California’s 1932 sales tax law superseded the 1872 law. But Bill said “no,” spending hours in the local law library and trekking back and forth to hearings in the capitol at Sacramento.
California bureaucrats harrumph that having disabled veterans run such exempt businesses costs the state, that’s too broke to pay attention, $25,000 a year. A legion of supporters say that is a tiny cost to allow disabled veterans to add a few dollars to their meager disability checks.
Anyway it’s Bill – 1; Goliath 0 and one for the good guys and another one against the hypocrites.