I read on another forum that apparently the city of Madison has a law which requires all dealers in precious metals to have a special permit which costs $2000. Supposedly, there was a coin show last weekend and the local police were stopping every dealer before they entered asking if they had the required paperwork, thus turning many of them away. Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? Chris
Yes its true! Saturday late afternoon the city contacted Jim of Jim's coins who has basically runs the show and informed them. Out of the 55 tables only 9 stayed IIRC. The only things that they could sell if they didn't have the permit were non silver/gold coins. Sorry if post is messed up posting from my crackberry, will respond more tommorrow when I get home
Yeah it is! Man, where is the media reports talking about the tens of thousands Madison will lose every year by such a barbaric law. I feel sorry for the show organizer, his show is now done. Even CA doesn't have the nerve to pass such harsh laws. Even the sales tax laws they do have are forcing dealers to extremely limit any trips into CA. I guess Madison WI just didn't want to host any coin shows any more.
Hopefully they will move the show to a suburb outside the city limits to get around this bizarre municipal law.
In the other forum I do believe they mentioned that they were going to move the show down the road to a friendlier community.
After posting here, I did a little looking on the net. Evidently, Madison is concerned that second hand dealers are the conduit for drug related crimes, where stolen jewelry and coins and other goods are sold so that those people can buy heroin and other drugs. And they determined the paper reporting procedures were just not cutting it. So they decided to go to electronic real time reporting or something, but found that they didn't have the money to support that, so they came up with the huge costs for dealers there to pay for that. What is really weird is that second hand jewelery dealers have to pay $$$ for the license, and if those same jewelry dealers also sell PMs then they have to pay again for that privilege. I'm not surprised that so many dealers dropped out of the show. Nice police work to spend their man hours showing that Madison just won't be soft on crime, eh? Interesting, isn't it? My take is that instead of having a number of people paying a reasonable amount of money to transact business in the city, they are going to have very few supporting this (the largest pawn shops, etc. who either can't or won't move, and will simply drop the prices they pay to people or increase their prices to make up for it) and the majority of the smaller dealers going to other "cities" or communities just outside Madison. Which will leave their new system not working due to lack of funds to support it (since they don't seem to have another source of income for it) and most likely no less drug ridden crimes happening because of this. What is your take (especially if you live in or near Madison)?
I agree, there will be no reduction in crime and a loss of income to the community from businesses leaving the area. You may be right about some staying and just reducing their buying prices to make up for it. But that means that the criminals will have to steal even more to keep their income up for their drug purchases. Net result, businesses moving out, revenue down, crime up.
Politicians doing their best too make sure nothing works unless they are paid up front. I saw remarks about pay offs on this some where too.
Sounds like about every major city in the US doesn't it? Same playbook, stupid rules cause businesses to flee even sooner from a hostile business environment. Heaven forbid you deal with the problem by catching the thieves and actually punishing them.
The show will continue though it will either be at the DeJope casino at the corner of 12/18 and I90 or will move back over to Middleton at the Hyatt. The reason the moved it from Middleton to begin with is the Hyatt upped their rates a few years back. ******Not to be construed as a political rant************ Part of what happened to the show is due to the fallout of the Scott Walker debacle. The City of Madison rushed to up all the contracts that they could for the union workers before the bill was signed. Shortly after this the City of Madison started to realize that they don't have enough money to cover their cost. They started to implement "fees" on quite a few things around. This just happens to be one of the money grabs the city chose to try and make up some of their short fall.
