With Toledo’s income tax predicted to be at 1997 levels, is now the time for tax credits?
While the idea of trying to encourage/reward businesses for keeping their employment levels at the current levels is a nice one, the question being raised by most of the local mayors in response to possible Mayoral candidate and Lucas County Commissioner Ben Konop’s latest proposal is that they can’t afford to take additional cuts in the money generated by this proposed payroll tax rebate.
When I watched this last night on WTVG (they don’t have a link up) Oregon Mayor Marge Brown was interviewed and she made it clear she doesn’t support this and suggested that if Lucas County was concerned about this, they could consider reducing sales tax or other areas that are within the control of the County.
WTOL and Fox Toledo have links up to their coverage of this story.
When I read Konop’s response to Waterville Mayor Derek Merrin:
Waterville Mayor Derek Merrin said it was contradictory of Mr. Konop to ask villages and cities to give up tax revenues when Mr. Konop voted in January, 2007, to raise taxes on the lodging industry to pay for a new county arena.
“Hotels and motels are businesses, and it doesn’t make any sense to raise taxes and then call for other municipalities to give tax incentives,” he said. The increase from 8 percent to 10 percent in the hotel-motel tax was enacted to raise half of the cost of the arena.
Mr. Konop said the arena will create jobs in Lucas County, and he said the tax is paid by visitors to Lucas County, not residents. He called Mr. Merrin’s argument weak.
It’s not really that weak of an argument, people from Lucas County do rent hotel rooms for a variety of reasons within Lucas County, while it may impact those outside of the area more than here, it’s not fair to say it has no impact. One could also question with the current economy and the desire of people to save money when planning a get a way how much this area having one of the highest hotel/motel taxes has on our local economy. The Blade reported occupancy was 40 percent in March of last year but they haven’t reported what the recent numbers are. The firm used to report that information, Smith Travel Research Inc., requires that reports must be purchased, so it’s hard to guess.
I can’t help think of the adage that it’s easier to tell other people what to do with their money than for you to do it with your own, the County does have several options available to it if they wanted to reduce property taxes for businesses or to reduce the sales tax. If we were talking about new jobs, that would be one thing, but there are already tax incentive programs that are in place, especially in Toledo to address that. I think everyone agrees our area needs to keep as many jobs as we can and to increase employment opportunities, I’m just not sure this particular plan is the way to do it.
