An editorial “Checking in: Before the decision can be made on the hotel room tax, the public needs to know what each hotel is paying, or not paying. That includes the downtown Marriott”opines:
“…facts are at a premium in the convention center debate, which is why the Sunday News last week filed a request under the state Right to Know Law for more detailed information from the county treasurer’s office on hotel room tax revenues.
“We do not know how well the Lancaster Marriott Hotel, in particular, is doing. The Marriott, the hotel connected to the convention center, is run by Penn Square Partners, made up of High Cos. and Lancaster Newspapers, publisher of the Sunday News. Considering all the taxpayer investment in the hotel building, which is owned by the city’s Redevelopment Authority, and the space the hotel shares with the convention center, it’s hard to argue that the public should not know whether the Marriott is on solid financial ground.
“And we do not know who’s correct in the battle over the convention center authority’s request to raise the hotel room tax from 3.9 percent to 5 percent.”
WATCHDOG: Two wags of the tail.
The community need not be given similar information for all hotels, but the Marriott performance data is very important for deciding how to deal with the Convention Center finances.
There are two interesting possibilities here. 1) The Lancaster Newspapers, Inc., a 50% limited partner in the Marriott, legally is required to obtain the High Company subsidiary general partner’s permission to publish the information, or 2) the editor(s) of the Sunday News is speaking independently.
But what we do know is that the High Companies are not volunteering the essential information, continuing the decline of S. Dale High’s reputation as a community benefactor to that of a villain. We wonder what his estimable father, the founder of the High Companies, would think of that.
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LNP rebels against High!
Assuming Marv still has a job next week…..LNP needs to divulge ALL the financials relative to the Marriott/Convention Center. And do it NOW, not after the fact.
Clearly the letter that I submitted to LNP on 2/23 was timely based on the ridiculous editorial in today’s (2/18) paper:
More Misdirection
I know I just run a hotel so you will have to explain this to me. What exactly would a breakdown of individual hotel tax returns, with their proprietary information, tell you? How would the disclosure you seek bring clarity to the difference between regularly audited County collections and the unaudited and incomplete Smith Travel Research (STR) numbers? Without the STR breakdowns, which you CANNOT get, what would you compare the County figures to? Why are you making an issue of this? Why not focus on real numbers that matter and reflect tax and CC performance? Here are a few: 1) 61.2%-1999 pretax occupancy vs 54.2%-2011 12 yrs. post tax occupancy; 2) a mere 1.2% increase in demand…the amount CC backers boast they have “created”; and 3) the fact that 2011 over 2010 tax receipts yield virtually NO growth at all. Could it be that you are pushing this red herring to avoid those numbers?
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The manner in which City & County leaders, RACL and the LCCCA allowed PSP to acquire their “private” hotel is a travesty. That said, it is a private entity. If you don’t like it, go and complain to those that allowed it: Gib Armstrong, Mike Sturla, Paul Thibault, Terry Kauffman, Ron Ford, Pete Shaub, Charlie Smithgall, Rick Gray, Jim Pickard, Ted Darcus, Steve Diamantoni, Nelson Polite, Julianne Dickson and Charles Simms (sorry if I left anyone off the list of fine civic leaders).
LNP, the PDCVB, or anyone else has no more right to know the details of this private business data than I do to question the entire Lancaster County Earned Income Tax Collection and request individual taxpayer returns from any county resident.
Taxing governmental agencies have a responsibility to follow their laws, collect taxes and enforce applicable penalties on those who do not follow the rules. As someone required to collect and remit hotel taxes, I can assure every resident of Lancaster that both Treasurer Ebersole, and Treasurer Sahd before him, do a thorough and complete job collecting and auditing the collection of county hotel taxes. This is a thorough and costly process but do not despair, the costs of that collection and auditing process is deducted from the exise tax proceeds…the tax that solely benefits the PDCVB.
This is proprietary business information and without a benchmark to compare it to, will tell you nothing. Smith Travel, a private entity that collects its data under strict rules of confidentiality, the same way the data for the original Earnst & Young report was collected and kept hush-hush, will NOT disclose their data. Other than for one entity to use this data to the competitive dis-advantage of others, what would these numbers tell you?
I am sorry to be the one to break the news but CC is a failure! Disclosing private business data will not make it a success.