Am I the dumb one?

Am I stupid to think that the city “bed tax” collected from hotels should be a levy to support tourism promotion? Shouldn’t we earmark at least some of that $288,000 toward attracting seminars and conventions, printing maps and brochures of Nogales, and funding visitors’ centers?

I wonder, because the tax is actually used to help pay for such things as buying toilet paper for city hall, bureaucrats’ salaries; an SUV used exclusively by the mayor; junkets; insurance, maintenance and car washes for the ever-expanding city fleet; and numerous other things, some more beneficial to taxpayers than others.

Ask anyone at city hall why the funds collected by the hotels are not used for tourism promotion and you won’t get a straight answer. The closest you’ll get is that when the tax was first proposed, it was not intended for that purpose.

Some claim it was enacted to fund salaries for public-safety personnel.

If that was the case, they should have raised court fees and traffic fines, ambulance charges and so on. Why put it on the back of the lodging sector?

I’ll go out on a limb and try to answer that last one. The bed tax was low-hanging fruit for politicians. They implemented it with minimal political backlash because it doesn’t usually affect anyone but out-of-town guests staying at hotels. It was easier than raising rates, or collecting the thousands of dollars in bad debt that is on the city books.

The trees are overgrown at city hall and all vision has been blocked for too long. The occupants of this municipal palace have no sense that by using bed-tax revenues to promote our community we can create new opportunities for economic development, which in turn puts more money by way of business licenses and sales taxes and even bed taxes back into city coffers.

Alas, the opportunity to do so has once again come and gone. The 2009-10 budget has been set and revenues from the bed tax have been committed to other government operations.

(Write us at 268 W. View Point Dr., Nogales, Ariz., 85621 or manuel.coppola@nogalesinternational.com.)