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Politicians are like crooks and would prefer to rob people that can't defend themselves. You rarely see an armed robber rob a cop with a gun.
Politicians are the same, they rarely rob special interest groups that can defend themselves and they would prefer to shake down defenseless people for their taxes. In this case that means soaking out of state residents who visit Arizona, but can't vote with hotel taxes and rental car taxes. Sadly this article written by the editorial staff at the Arizona Republic supports that form of armed robbery. Cactus League's future depends on hotel tax By Editorial board The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Mar 7, 2013 5:43 PM Two years from now, when the Oakland Athletics move into Hohokam Stadium, they’ll enjoy a few amenities the Mesa ballpark’s current tenants — the Chicago Cubs, set to move to a new park nearby — have gone without since the stadium opened in 1997. These include a new, upgraded weight room, along with substantial renovations to a locker room that has gone largely unchanged over the past 15 years. The familiar red-and-blue trim throughout the stadium will be painted over to reflect the Athletics’ green and yellow color scheme. All of the changes will be paid for by the Cactus League, part of an effort to make its facilities as desirable as possible to retain the 15 teams that call the Valley home each spring. The overhaul is a fitting analogy for a league that knows it, too, must implement some sweeping changes of its own if it wishes to remain economically viable. The problem is, no one seems to know exactly what those changes will be. The Hohokam Park rebranding is one of several multimillion-dollar projects financed by the Cactus League through a handful of revenue sources, primarily a rental-car tax that began in the early 1990s to support the league after it almost folded in the late 1980s. That tax, which collects 3.25 percent of Maricopa County rental-car transactions, is set to expire in early 2031. “We’re going to need to find other (revenue) sources,” said Tom Sadler, executive director of the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority, which handles the money generated by the rental-car tax and a separate 1percent hotel tax. “There are a few ideas incubating out there,” he said, but declined to offer any specific proposed solutions at this point, indicating only that funding would need to be raised on a countywide level and not through the efforts of individual municipalities. That latter approach has been exercised in recent years with varying degrees of success, including Glendale’s fiasco with Camelback Ranch and Mesa’s coup in persuading its residents to pony up $84 million in funding for the new Cubs stadium. One potential new source might be the implementation of a league-wide “ticket tax,” said Chris Calcaterra, vice president of marketing and promotions for the league. The new tax, strictly hypothetical at this point, would represent a significant shift away from a model that has in many ways been dependent on the strength of the local tourism industry. The league has done an admirable job in nearly doubling the number of its teams in the past decade and, in the process, transforming itself into an enormous annual boost to our economy. Whether it can retain those teams and its impact will hinge on its ability to adapt what its leaders believe to be an untenable funding model. While the rental-car and general-sales taxes are indeed at their respective breaking points, there’s still room to raise hotel taxes as a funding mechanism for the league. Scottsdale and Phoenix, for example, have lodging-tax rates lower than those of seven other municipalities in Arizona. Presently, the Sports and Tourism Authority earns a little more than $20 million per year from a 1 percent countywide hotel-tax increase implemented in 2001. Although that revenue stream is set to expire in 2031, doubling it would facilitate improvements the league may need to keep its existing teams while strengthening its bond with a rebounding tourism industry. |