In fact, hotels and inns—particularly the “transient occupancy tax” (TOT) they pay for every room they let—are helping take care of the locals to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, even in these shaky economic times.
Napa County, which reaps TOT from hostelries located outside city limits, took in nearly $210,000 more in room taxes for April through June of 2008 than for the same period last year. “This year, we collected $2,671,597,” for the three-month period, says Pam Kindig, the county’s auditor-controller. The figure for the same quarter last year was less than $2.5 million. Kindig won’t venture a guess at the reason for the increase, saying, “It could be a lot of things, such as increased room costs. It’s hard for us to determine exactly what caused this increase, but it appears as though we had a strong visitor base.” Measured words, but it’s hard not to imagine there were some high-fives in Kindig’s office when the quarterly taxes were totaled.
Allen Isidro, revenue manager for the city of Napa, is also upbeat, saying hotel taxes for fiscal year 2007-2008 appeared to be well ahead of projections as he worked to finalize the numbers in August. I’ll have an update for you next month; expect it to be good news for hotels, their developers and local residents alike. That’s because most of the 12 percent room tax (in each city and in the unincorporated county) goes into the municipalities’ general funds. These funds are essential to city and county operations, as they can be spent wherever they’re needed as approved by local government.
By comparison, the half-cent countywide sales tax can only be used for projects related to flood control, while property taxes are divided among up to two dozen agencies: the county, five cities, six school districts and more than 25 special districts including sanitation and mosquito control. Some of the county’s room tax revenue is reserved for a special projects fund for parks and open space, Kindig says, but more than 10 percent of it goes straight to the general fund.
So hotels aren’t such a waste of resources as the grumblers claim. I’m not even mentioning the hundreds of jobs they create in hospitality, which is second only to the wine industry among Napa County’s top employers. Between the two, we have some 25,000 people working to help the local economy reap an estimated $1 billion per year, most of it from Napa Valley visitors.
Of course, thousands of these workers must commute into the valley—many of them through the notoriously narrow and winding Jamieson Canyon Road (Highway 12) between Solano and Napa counties—because they can’t afford to live here. To prevent fields and vineyards from sprouting residential neighborhoods, Napa County’s strict land-use laws prohibit converting agricultural lands to other purposes without a general vote. That’s made existing homes hard to afford for even well-paid workers with local jobs, and it’s not unusual for sons and daughters of longtime Napa families to find they must move to Solano County to afford their first homes.
A proposed mixed-use development that could place thousands of residences at the abandoned Napa Pipe factory on the Napa River might remedy the shortage, but the project—whose public partners include visionary developer Keith Rogal (Carneros Inn, Carneros Lodge) and Napa’s affable former mayor Ed Henderson—has stirred vehement opposition. The proponents of what’s been nicknamed “Napa Pipe” wound up spending the better part of $1 million campaigning against a ballot measure that would have rewritten county law to require voter approval for nearly every development proposal to come before the county.
Based on the battles over Measure N, which failed by a narrow margin in the June election, its success would have brought endless waves of confusion to voters’ homes as each and every housing proposal became a political campaign. For weeks before the election, we were barraged with costly, full-color mailers complete with Photoshopped images (a Trojan horse looming among the vineyards was my favorite for shamelessness), strident accusations and claims of support that were apt to prove unfounded. Really: The Democrats and the American Independent Party wanted us to vote “yes on N”? (Apparently, someone working in the political PR industry thinks my “decline to state” registration means I’m a member of the God-obsessed AIP. Uh, no.)
Private money paid for the mailers—including the ones purporting to be from the Dems and the AIP, which upon closer examination originated with neither—and private businesses benefited, from consultants and copywriters to designers and printers. Of course, most of these entities aren’t located in Napa, so the money didn’t stay here. But if it ever comes to pass that every development decision in Napa County must go before the voters, we’re the ones who’ll be paying for a lot of sample ballots and special elections.
And since developers never have to open their boardrooms to the public or explain how and where they’re spending their money, we’ll be throwing away what we already pay to have our county planning department sift through these proposals carefully on our behalf. And those county planners are overseen by the appointed planning commission, itself overseen by the elected supervisors, who report to the voters. That’s four layers of public accountability, under existing law, and I’m glad to be among the Napa County voters who’d rather let these qualified people do the jobs we pay them for than turn every decision into an interest-financed battle for votes.
