The pre-election timing of this effort is surprising, but I'm glad someone finally took the initiative to propose including a local meal tax on city restaurants, particularly if the money were used to maintain the streets and sidewalks of the downtown.
Daily News article here. Ward 4 Councilor Ed Cameron, the electorally unopposed proposer, also writes on it here in his blog.
Let's be frank here. We have some nice restaurants in town, a few really nice ones. But I'm not sure we have anything good enough to draw people from far and away.
What draws people here is the location, the downtown, the ability to enjoy a great meal and walk the boardwalk or visit the downtown shops.
I say it's perfectly reasonable to tack a small tax onto the meals being served in those restaurants to maintain the infrastructure that visitors--and us locals--like so much. I'm all for earmarking the funds for improvements downtown. Bricks will start to give away. Boardwalks will wear down. Things will need to be replaced and it'd be nice to have a dedicated stream to take care of those things.
I'm sure the fear is this revenue will get lost in the flood of tax money and go toward other city services (like a school...gasp!). But I'm guessing--since it's the only sales tax collected by the city--that the totals will be fairly easy to track. But I might be wrong on that.
I'm against, however, using this money to bolster any chamber marketing campaign as Ann Ormond suggests in the Daily News article. I'd like the extra money I'm paying to go toward paying for something tangible and visible like infrastructure.
It will be the subject of the council's Tuesday meeting.
7 comments:
raising taxes during a recession? brilliant!
Way to write a bumper sticker anonymous.
First off, the recession is over, but I get your larger point.
The trouble with bumper stickers is they can't present the entire picture. Here's how I see it.
We do need to diversify our tax base. We can't just keep taxing property owners, particularly as this city increasingly becomes a tourist destination.
Karp is going to build downtown and he's not building single family homes (thank goodness.) He's building restaurants and storefronts.
It makes sense to me to have a mechanism in place to draw more taxes from that commercial base without necessarily shifting toward the split tax rate that some folks are proposing.
Well some of us prefer a residential exemption, but local option meals and hotel taxes are a good start - together with paid parking.
Great point Bubba and one I totally intended and subsequently forgot to make. Meals are only part of the process. Parking would be next.
I wouldn't dismiss a residential exemption for property taxes as it would counter balance the more regressive meals tax and parking fees. It also makes an override or debt exclusion more palatable.
Bubba,
Please expound on the Residential Exemption. I've looked into it a bit.
Ed
Ed,
In general the residential exemption makes property taxes less regressive by exempting a fixed amount from property taxation. See (http://www.cityofboston.gov/assessing/resexempt.asp) for how it works in Boston. Beyond making the property tax less regressive it also distinguishes income producing properties from non-income producing properties - with only the latter qualifying for the exemption. This results in commericial properties, residential rental properties, and high-end owner occupied properties pay a little more and low-end OO residential paying less. This also attempts to mitigate the issue of the under-assessment of commercial properties while avoiding the more punitive slit-rate.
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