Amid recent talk of tight budgets and overdue capital projects, Mount Airy Commissioner Shirley Brinkley gave voice to an idea for raising city revenue: Retaining some of the occupancy the city collects and hands over to the Mount Airy Tourism Development Authority (TDA) each year.
The TDA is responsible for marketing the city — and to a lesser degree the entire county in conjunction with the Tourism Partnership of Surry County. Its annual budget is financed through the collection of the occupancy taxes, and about two-thirds of its annual budget goes to advertising and marketing the area.
The TDA serves several important functions. First among those is its work to directly market the city to prospective tourists, not just in North Carolina, but in other states as well. Second, it works in conjunction with the county partnership to pool resources and market the entire county. Third among the many functions it serves is to help fund local infrastructure projects that make the area a more appealing destination for visitors.
When the state code was modified to allow the city to charge an occupancy tax, the city collected roughly $100,000 for the TDA to use.
That has been a wise investment, with the tax now generating an expected $360,000 to $400,000 in the present fiscal year — showing tourist stays in local hotels has risen considerably in recent years. While the improving national economy is certainly behind some of that growth, there is no doubt much of it is attributable to the targeted, well-planned marketing efforts of the TDA.
Just because more occupancy tax money is coming in, however, is not necessarily a sound reason for the TDA budget to continue to grow. That’s not a slam against the TDA — the good folks there have been quite successful in growing the tourism base in Mount Airy.
However, in recent talks by the city commissioners regarding the potential for a tax increase, we recall discussions the board a while back regarding the potential for selling standing timber at the Westwood Industrial Park. At that time, the figure of $300,000 to $400,000 in revenue from the potential timber sale was bandied about — a figure some on the city board of commissioners thought could fund a 4-cent decrease in the city tax rate.
Which brings us back to Brinkley’s idea. If the TDA was effective with a $100,000 budget, and now might be bringing in as much as $400,000 with occupancy taxes, there seems to be ample opportunity for the city to keep some of those funds without hurting the TDAs efforts.
And doing so could help keep the city tax rate from moving up.
Such a change would require the General Assembly to modify the code allowing Mount Airy to collect the tax. Officials would have to be careful about the wording of such a modification so has not to bring about any sort of unintended consequence with funding for tourism efforts.
Still, we like Brinkley’s proposal, and we believe most in Mount Airy would as well. We suggest city commissioners move with haste to look at the proposal, and if state code modification can be written in such a manner as to not reduce the overall occupancy tax collected by the city, we hope Mount Airy officials will move fast enough to get legislation introduced in this session of the General Assembly.
Waiting a year could be costly to the residents of Mount Airy.
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