Bend officials are looking for new ways to enforce the requirement that most companies purchase a city business license, after a greater number of businesses than expected failed to renew their licenses this summer.

City employees already knew that some of the estimated 8,000 businesses in Bend were unlicensed, but they were surprised in recent months when they issued fewer licenses than budgeted and even fewer licenses than during the same period of time in the last two years.

“We missed our mark in July by quite a bit,” said Bend Business Advocate Carolyn Eagan. That month, city business license revenue was nearly $6,700 lower than budgeted, according to analysis of figures provided by the Finance Department. That means the city issued roughly 130 fewer $50 business licenses than it expected that month.

The problem is that many existing businesses are not renewing their licenses, Eagan said. By contrast, Eagan said the numbers of new business licenses issued in recent months increased approximately 100 percent from the previous year. Revenue from the business licenses pays for Eagan’s job, as an ombudsman to local businesses.

The city also uses data from the licenses to notify businesses of city projects and changes in the law that might affect them, and the city is working to share the information with firefighters and police so they know what to expect when they respond to potential emergencies at various businesses.

This year, officials also decided to give $10,000 of the business license revenue to the nonprofit Economic Development for Central Oregon, on top of the $70,000 annual contribution to the group from the city general fund. Officials built the business advocacy budget on the assumption that more of the businesses in Bend will obtain licenses this year, so the budget includes an expectation that license revenue will increase by $40,000 this year, to nearly $300,000, according to the Finance Department.

The city charges $50 annually for a business license. Officials set that amount arbitrarily when they enacted the license program in 2006, according to a recent memorandum from Eagan.

Eagan is researching the actual cost to issue new licenses and renew them, and so far she has found it takes longer for city employees to enter new businesses in the city license system.

“Once the costs of processing each license is known, I recommend that we add the cost of processing each license to the initial business license,” Eagan wrote in the memorandum. “Based on my initial calculations, we would add $15 to each new license, making a new license $65.”

The city should also create an incentive for businesses to renew their licenses quickly, because the city wastes time sending second renewal notices to businesses, Eagan wrote. However, Eagan emphasized in an interview Monday that officials have not made any decisions about the licenses. Eagan said she and the Bend Economic Development Advisory Board want input from businesses, as they discuss how to get more businesses to comply with the license requirement.

Bend has the legal authority to cite businesses that do not purchase licenses, but the city has never done so. At a recent meeting, members of the economic development advisory committee said charging a higher fee for new business licenses because it costs more to enter them into the system and then offering a lower renewal fee might make sense. If businesses were slow to renew, the city could make them start the process again and pay the higher initial fee, committee members suggested.

City Councilor Victor Chudowsky said the license fees pay for valuable services to local businesses, and the city needs to enforce the license requirement. The city recently hired a contractor to ensure that owners of vacation rental homes pay the city tourism tax. If the contractor succeeds in enforcing the tourism tax, officials should consider doing something similar with the business licenses, Chudowsky said.

“It’s a city ordinance, it was meant to apply to everyone fairly,” Chudowsky said of the business license requirement. “If we’re going to have an ordinance on the books, we have to enforce it.”

Chudowsky said the city is a friendlier place for businesses, thanks to the Bend Economic Development Advisory Board and the business advocate job that officials created several years ago. “It’s become a really good pro-business voice inside city government,” Chudowsky said of the program.

Eagan also earned a fan during her recent work with local music festival organizers. Bend Roots Revival founder Mark Ransom said Eagan was one of the few people who thought his plan to move the festival to the cluttered home improvement resale yard at Pakit Liquidators in southeast Bend would work.

“There were so many different people, people close to me like family members and close friends, people who have known me for a really long time, and they really thought I was crazy,” Ransom said. “They could not see the vision at all, and so a lot of them kind of jumped ship.”

Eagan did a good job conveying the vision for Bend Roots Revival to other city employees who would review the festival site and plans, and Eagan also clearly laid out what organizers needed to accomplish in order for the city to permit the event, Ransom said.

“She saw what I was talking about, through all the clutter, before I even started,” Ransom said.