Clearly the letter that I submitted to LNP on 2/13 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 Ernst & 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.”
Rodney Gleiberman
Continental Inn
Rodney is correct, as usual. But it is interesting to watch Lancaster Newspapers directly attack their own partner in the Penn Square Partners.
Could it be that Lancaster Newspapers was snookered about this project just like so many politicians and civic leaders?
EDITOR: Vist Chapter Sixteen of the Convention Center Series.
It is highly likely that Fulton Bank’s CEO Rufus Fulton was sending Lancaster Newspapers, Inc’s CEO Jack Buckwalter a message when he sent Robert Field to meet with Buckwalter. But rather than recognizing and correcting its errors, the Lancaster Newspapers, Inc. ‘dug in’ and became a willing, powerful and at times cruel accessory to what followed.