by David Safier
Southern Arizona leaders are working on legislation that would let Pima County voters decide if they want to raise sales taxes to build a new stadium and spend money renovating the existing homes of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies.
[snip]
The plan, sponsored by state Rep. Vic Williams, R-Tucson, asks the Legislature to let Pima County voters decide on creating a sports taxing district similar to the one in Maricopa County. The district then would levy additional sales taxes on hotels, car rentals, restaurants, bars and retail. The tax rate would range from 0.15 to 0.45 percent.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
My wife & I work in the hospitality industry, hotels specifically. Taxes on transient rooms (under 30 days) to fund sporting complexes or convention centers are a fact of life for us. The benefit is that we get increased business from out of town visitors, and the tax has very little or no impact on local taxpayers. The bad news is that it’s almost always permanent, it’s basically taxation without representation & sometimes you don’t always get the results you wanted.
Up here in Maricopa, we’re kind of expecting the Dbacks & Rockies to come up here regardless. They have an escape clause in their contracts to allow them to move if a certain number of teams are based here and it looks like Maricopa will get there in 2010. Even my hometown Reds are moving here from Florida. Pima might end up building a nice stadium only to see it’s teams leave anyway.
We’re basically taking the rest of the teams who did spring training in Florida. Florida did a lousy job maintaining their facilities.
The prop. 302 Maricopa lodging tax has been success. The sporting complexes it has built have brought in a lot of positive business & benefited local sports fans. It’s also one of the few things keeping a lot of area hotels afloat right now as the facilities are spread out across the valley.
Hooray!!! Thane and I agree on something!!!
As for what you could say, David? How about “Gasp! Please tell me this is a joke!”
I’m speechless.
I would hope your comment would be “Thank you for visiting Tuscon.”
I hope that this and other proposals to have city and county governments prostitute their taxpayers (whether the government is in Maricopa county or Pima county) to benefit sports teams will come to a swift end.
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1818