PTC hotel-motel tax collections
fall short
By JOHN
MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com
The final numbers
for the 2001-2002 fiscal year show that Peachtree City came up short on
hotel-motel tax collections by approximately $107,000.
City officials
said $832,458 was collected in hotel-motel taxes, far short of the budgeted
amount of $939,922. That represents a decline of over 11 percent from
staff's original projections.
The decline
is being blamed on the downturn in the economy and the slowdown in the
travel industry.
The hotel-motel
tax funds are used to help support the city's Airport Authority, which
owns and operates Falcon Field, and its Development Authority, which operates
the tennis center and amphitheater. The city also gets a separate portion
of the funds to use on other projects: 19.4 percent for the recently ended
fiscal year.
The city's
share will drop to 12.7 percent this year, with the development authority
getting 56.8 percent and the airport authority getting 30.5 percent.
In January,
several City Council members asked both authorities to enact agreements
with the city to save a portion of its hotel-motel tax funds each month
to reimburse the city in case of a shortfall at the end of the fiscal
year.
The City Council
eventually declined to sign the shortfall agreements offered by the authorities,
pending the outcome of the report from a special attorney on the two separate
hotel-motel tax distribution agreements between the city and the authorities.
The special
attorney ruled those agreements, which specified how much hotel-motel
tax money the authorities would get, were invalid. The tax shortfall agreements
were never signed, but the airport authority has put aside money on a
monthly basis to prepare for a shortfall.
Mayor Steve
Brown said he thought the authorities should have offered to cover more
of the hotel-motel tax shortfall in those agreements.
"That's
the hazard you have when you have a body that's appointed with no accountability
after they're appointed to the citizens at large," Brown said. "We
wanted them to account for their portion of the shortfall and they weren't
willing to do that."
Since February,
the Airport Authority has held back $35,000 to help "make up"
for a shortfall in the hotel-motel tax, said Chairwoman Cathy Nelmes.
The airport authority's share will likely tally to about $21,000, she
added.
"We just
changed our plan" to save the funds, Nelmes said. "We started
saving in February after talking about it with the council. We did it
because we wanted to do our share."
The Development
Authority had offered an agreement to the council earlier in the year
that would have set aside approximately $80,000 for the shortfall. But
since the agreement went unsigned by the council, the authority has spent
approximately that amount on attorneys fees, said development authority
executive director Virgil Christian.
The legal fees
have gone towards the equal pay lawsuit filed by former amphitheater director
Kristi Rapson and the dispute with the city council over the hotel-motel
tax intergovernmental agreements, Christian said.
"We are
spending a lot of time with stuff that is not taking the city anywhere,"
Christian said. "Ultimately, it will cost the citizens."
|
