City Council is considering a plan to double the hotel-motel tax in the city from 3 percent to 6 percent.
Resident Tom Bayer, who is a member of the Bowling Green Convention and Visitors Bureau, spoke at Monday night’s city council meeting regarding his concerns for the new tax.
“I used to be a representative for a Best Western, and I was working in Cincinnati when a similar hotel-motel tax was implemented and it wasn’t pretty,” Bayer said. “The number of leisure travelers went down, and it had a major effect on our hotel.”
Bayer said Lucas County had added a similar hotel-motel tax, approximately a two percent tax, to its community in 2007, and within a matter of a year or so the community lost 731 rooms.
“If we increase this tax, we will definitely see a negative effect on our town,” he said.
Bayer said there are leisure travelers known as ‘snowbirds’ that travel south each year from the upper peninsula in Michigan and Canada. These people keep logs of places to stay while on their way down to the warmer states.
“Bowling Green is usually the first place the ‘snowbirds’ stop to stay the night on the way down, and the last place they rest before their way back up north,” Bayer said. “The logs they keep tell them where the great and cheapest places to stay are. I know for a fact that BG will no longer be one of the places they stop. Word gets around, and they’ll know not to stop here anymore because of the tax increase.”
The loss of spendable income from travelers skipping Bowling Green to move on and stay at the next town will “negatively affect our attractions, restaurants and gas stations alike,” Bayer said.
Jackie Nowicki, another resident, spoke at Monday’s city council meeting about the new hotel-motel tax.
“I’m concerned,” Nowicki said. “I’m always concerned about taxes, and I think it is important that city council looks into any kind of privatization of city services of some sort, or have experts from hotels and motels in the area come in and teach council exactly how the tax will affect the area.”
Nowicki said her biggest fear is that the whole city would feel the diminishing returns from visitors not coming to the area and lodging here.
City council is not hiding that its primary goal in raising the tax is to generate more money for the city’s general fund. On Nov. 2, the city will ask voters to raise the municipal income tax from 1.92 percent to 2 percent, with the proceeds from the increase earmarked for fire and ambulance service, according to a Toledo Blade report Tuesday.
“Ms. Florea, chairman of the convention and visitors board, said the six local hotels represented by the Bowling Green Lodging Association are opposed to raising the hotel-motel tax in part because the proceeds would not help tourism and because it gives them a competitive disadvantage. The proposal calls for increasing the three percent tax by one percentage point a year in 2011, 2012, and 2013,” according to the report.
