The hotel/motel tax was created to help tourism in a community. It was designed to fill up the hotels, motels and restaurants in a community or county. Everett’s new arena will do this and deserves some of the money from the tax, as do the AquaSox. But many small worthy events that have been going on for years do without this money because of the bigger professional organizations.
I ran the Evergreen International Youth Soccer Tournament for 12 years from 1988. One-hundred-fifty teams participated in our tournament from as far away as Germany and England. Three-thousand people needed housing. Using Chamber of Commerce figures, we estimated that we brought in approximately $750,000 to the Everett area. Unfortunately, because of a lack of fields in one location in Everett, we had to move the tournament out of town.
In the 1990s we wanted to get help from the hotel/motel tax. We applied to Snohomish County and received $3,000 a year. We could also have applied with the City of Everett for the tax, but we didn’t. We knew that to apply for the hotel tax, spend the time to fill out the forms, etc., the small amount of money we might receive wouldn’t be worth the effort. Salty Sea Days had most of the money locked up. I asked the area hotels if they had a big increase in patrons during Salty Sea Days. None of them did. The weekend of our tournament, the hotels were booked solid.
To me, the hotel/motel tax was designed to return the money to the hotels and motels in the form of higher bookings, not to help a town with a local community festival. Salty Sea Days is a wonderful community festival. It should go on for years to come in some form. But it doesn’t fill the hotels, most people who attend live locally and it shouldn’t get the funding from the city in the form of taxes from the hotels and motels. Find some other way of funding it.
Camano Island
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