Durham’s community marketing agency does an incredible job of benchmarking the impact and relevance of visitors to the community, thanks to partners like DK Shifflet & Associates (DKSA) and the company now known as IHS Global Insights.
That includes documenting “all” tax revenue yielded for federal, state and especially local governments. And this includes local property taxes, not just sales and use taxes.
Why property taxes? Because visitors impact property taxes big time. Tourism is “demand-side” economic development.
DCVB spearheads community marketing to draw and optimize visitor demand which in turn both makes existing visitor related businesses sustainable and generates interest in the marketplace to make new businesses feasible.
The more hotels, restaurants, entertainment centers, nightclubs, taxi cabs/limos, malls and retail stores thrive, the more the value of property increases and the more demand there is for property.
Thanks to the analysis, it is clear 100% of lodging properties, a third of restaurants and a half to a third of retail stores, sports teams and entertainment venues would not exist without visitors.
And the property taxes in the tally are just those paid directly by visitor related businesses and only those supported by the proportion of each companies business reliant on visitors. It could be argued that compression created in and around these businesses by non-visitor related businesses should be
And with visitors there is no such thing as a guaranteed base. Each and every traveler has an open decision at the beginning of the year and Durham has to earn their return.
So “all” visitor generated and visitor reliant tax revenues count, including property taxes, just the same way as local government would use additional property taxes to evaluate or justify a relocating business or adaptive reuse of historic properties.
No comments:
Post a Comment