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You learn something every day, and in Sunday's Post I learned what fools we Coloradans were in 1993 when we voted down the 0.2 percent sales tax that funded the Colorado Tourism Board.
Every hotel room unoccupied, meal unserved, lift
ticket unsold is an opportunity that disappears
forever,
observed Eugene Dilbeck, president of the
Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau.
And every empty seat at a How to Telemarket During
Dinner Hour
seminar, every vacant step on a mall
escalator, every unoccupied parking space -- more
money-making opportunities gone forever. Most enterprises
figure on a certain vacancy factor, but the Tourism
Industry apparently reckons that if a day passes without an
attraction getting stuffed to capacity or more, there are
eternal consequences.
Dilbeck cited figures from the largest tourism
research firm in North America,
to note that
Colorado is losing its appeal as a national
destination.
And with more promotion, it might lose its appeal even
faster. One attraction of Colorado, at least according to
various relatives and freeloaders who appear at my house in
clement seasons, is wide-open spaces.
The more people who visit, the less wide and open those spaces. Eventually, people who want that will go to the Great Divide Basin of Wyoming or the Sand Hills of Nebraska, since Colorado is just too crowded to suit them.
Other people look for rustic charm in the hinterlands, and discover that the hinterlands now look much like every other generic franchise strip. These tourists, in search of something distinctive, will look elsewhere.
To keep the tourist flow coming -- those needy folks who invested in new SuperEconomy 9's and BurgerWorlds have payments to make, after all -- new attractions must be contrived: make that national monument into a national park, or gouge some more landscape for exciting single-track mountain-biking or thrilling off-road 4WD adventures.
Even better, arrange a balloon, jazz, opera, bluegrass, mushroom or crafts festival every estival weekend. Brings in the tourist dollars, and who cares whether the locals have a place to shop or park?
But we have it from an authority that the Tourist Industry needs our help. And so, I offer these suggestions to make a Tourist Industry Subsidy Tax more palatable to Colorado voters:
· Use part of the proceeds to fund Tourism
Impact Grants.
Back in the mining days, there were
Mineral Impact Grants to help local jurisdictions pay for
public facilities which they needed on account of the
population brought in by mining activity.
Under the old tourism tax, a town could use that public money to tout itself, but if the promotion succeeded, that fund had no money for things like extra parking and public restrooms. That's stupid.
A Tourism Impact Fund would allow tourists to pay for some of the demands they place on communities, from trash pickup to ambulance service.
And when I'm touring, I'd like it if some of the lodging and restaurant tax I paid went for things I used, rather than for more marketing to bring in more people to strain the facilities and lessen my enjoyment of the trip.
· Tourist-free zones. Well, not quite, since some court would find it unconstitutional. (Some Indian tribes manage this on their reservations, yet we White Eyes won a century of brutal wars against them -- why do they now have more control over their communities than we do?)
So we'll have restricted areas, where every visitor has to carry a signed authorization from a resident of that county, who is responsible for his behavior. That is, if you vouch for Cousin Fred, who leaves a gate open and costs a rancher some serious money, you get the bill.
· Minimum wage for Tourist Industry employees. The industry specializes in low-paying seasonal jobs in areas where it jacks up the real-estate prices, so that its chattels -- often imported from Mexico or Nigeria -- have to commute for an hour or more each way from a mobile-home park hidden from upscale tourist eyes.
The minimum-wage formula will be simple -- your house should cost about three times your annual wage, so the Tourist Industry minimum wage will be one-third of the average house price in that resort. For instance, if the average Vail house is $1.2 million, then the minimum wage there will be $400,000 a year.
If the Tourist Industry is willing to adopt these simple reforms, then I'll be willing to support the Tourist Industry Subsidy Tax. And I think a majority of other Coloradans would, too.
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