San Diego OpEd

KPBS's Sharma Tells Slanted Tale on Tourism Marketing District

What's wrong with asking the tourists to help us keep San Diego nice
By Mark S. Burgess
Posted on Apr 09 2008
Last updated Apr 09 2008

Amita Sharma at KPBS published a story on kpbs.org (“San Diego Tax Hike Money Goes to Hoteliers”) about the new Tourism Marketing District (links to a PDF file) that is a study in biased and incomplete reporting. If her intent is to ignite controversy, it’s perfect. If her intent was to inform the public, she missed.

The story presents the new Tourism Marketing District (TMD) as an end around ploy by the city council because the voters turned down two measures to increase the existing Transit Occupancy Tax on those same hotel guests. The existing Transit Occupancy Tax (TOT) was created (as she said) to collect a fee from tourists visiting San Diego in order to promote San Diego around the country to encourage more people to visit. Tourism, if you don’t know is one of San Diego’s main industries.

You can read the story, so let’s focus on the facts Ms. Sharma left out of her story.

- That fund used to provide nearly $15 million dollars to the body created to do that promotion, the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau (Convis)

- Today, that fund has been reduced to $8 million dollars and the rest has been used by the city for other purposes (see our piece “Turning the Good Ship San Diego the Right Way”

- The new Tourism Marketing District is slated to fund Convis entirely. The city gets its $8m back.

Donna Frye of the City Council reveals the reason she’s not mayor in her partisan and disingenuous comments about the new fee to hotels guests that fund the TMD. She calls it “the public’s money.” Exactly which public is she talking about? Those of us who live here? If so, then she’s distorted the truth. Taxes and fees belong to the people who made the money in the first place. In this case, that’s the tourists who visit San Diego. Like a lot of politicians who require sucking dollars from our pockets, “the public’s money” means funds they get to play with.

Nobody likes taxes, especially an overtaxed population like San Diego. And, it should be said that the hotel industry shot itself in the foot the last time it tried to raise the TOT after failing the first time. It was promoted, just after the 2003 fires, as the “Emergency Services Initiative” – part of the money to go to promote tourism and part to support firefighters and other first responders. In that guise, the voters detected the double shuffle and dismissed it. (see “A Word about the Tourism Fee” (part way down the page.)

Donna Frye is among the council that would rather tax those of us who live here than charge a fee for this great place to visit – even if the fee is less than what the rest of the country’s tourism meccas that we compete against charge! The initial cuts to the Convis budget occurred after the pension fund scandal revealed the city was near bankruptcy as operated by the city council of which Donna Frye was a member.

While San Diego is a great place, when people from around the country consider their vacation plans, it’s important we get in front of them. Our web site (sandiego.com) gets the first look from many who thought of us on their own and type in our domain name to their browsers. We are the first place many encounter San Diego on the web for the first time. That number doesn’t change much. However, for those that don’t think to type it in, we need to be prompting them. To do that takes money.

And it is true, once the tourists get here, we need to ensure the place is safe and well kept as Donna Frye said. What’s wrong with asking those same tourists to help us? Certainly Disneyland and the Las Vegas casinos aren’t taxing the people of Anaheim and the citizens of Las Vegas, respectively, to build and maintain their attractions!

One of the reasons the city’s pension fund mess took so long to hit the press was because the reporters charged with covering it didn’t look at or didn’t understand the financial reports in front of them. In this case, Ms. Sharma took a position on the subject of the TMD and fleshed it out without doing her homework. Since the citizens of San Diego will benefit from the NEW MONEY coming in through the TMD, she would have served her “publicly” funded station and its contributors better if she had looked at all the facts.

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Comments

Posted by Alec	April 9, 2008
Mr. Burgess is right on point in at least two important areas. First, San Diego has significantly under taxed tourists relative to other major destinations for many years and second, this new money from tourists (Read non-residents) replaces money that is otherwise spent by taxpayers (Read residents) to promote tourism.

Posted by foobar	April 9, 2008
Why should a tax on tourists pay for firefighting equipment?

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