More Good News From the State Legislature
The local option for municipal hotel taxes in Saint Louis and Saint Charles counties have been eliminated! This is excellent news. Both counties already have countywide hotel taxes in place, and those systems work just fine. Cities with hotels in them will still collect normal sales taxes on room rentals, property taxes on the hotels, and business license fees. They don’t need special city hotel taxes on top of that. For more detail about why these local taxes are an unnecessary burden, check out the op-eds I wrote about local hotel taxes.
The few cities that already have such a tax will keep it, and there is an exception for Saint Peters. I don’t know why they get an exception, but that is probably a topic for another post. On the whole, this is a very good change that will reduce the constant quest by cities to look for new revenue sources every place they can.
Thanks to John Combest for the link to the original article.
I am torn on this one. If we believe that decisions are best made by those closest to the action, the Jeff City is telling every single municipality, save St. Peter’s, that a hotel tax is a bad thing. Some voters of some municipalities may feel differently down the road, but Jeff City has said ‘we, the state leg, know better than you, the voters of the municipality in question’. I was disappointed to see that the real estate transfer tax ban passed a bit back for the same reasons.
That being said, I am not a fan of taxing people who usually have no vote on said taxes, like hotel guests.
Comment by Papillon — May 20, 2011 @ 10:49 a.m.
I would sometimes agree on the default position in favor of local control, but in both these cases St. Louis and St. Charles counties have countywide tourism taxes passed by a majority of the voters. So the voters there have spoken. While I don’t automatically agree all of the things supported by the current tourism taxes should benefit from tax dollars, I see absolutely no value added by allowing cities to stack additional hotel taxes on top of the countywide taxes.
In areas without countywide tourism taxes, I would not make this argument. My point in the Jefferson City piece linked to above was against Jeff City increasing its current hotel tax for a purpose (a conference center) that the private sector was entirely capable of providing. I did not argue against the legitimacy of Jeff City having a hotel / tourism tax in the first place.
Comment by David Stokes — May 20, 2011 @ 11:40 a.m.