Yachats manager says commissions should start counting visitors to defend spending decisions

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com   

Yachats city manager Shannon Beaucaire is urging commissions that oversee public facilities to begin quantifying how many visitors use them to help fend off possible challenges to how the city spends lodging taxes.

She made the suggestion Wednesday during a presentation on transient lodging taxes to the city Finance Committee.

Beaucaire wants the Finance Committee – made up of two City Council members and representatives from the city’s four commissions – to get a good grasp of the taxes Yachats collects from motels and vacation rentals and state-imposed restrictions on how it uses them.

Commissions should push for documentation of visitor numbers to public facilities like the library, Commons and the Little Log Church, she said, “to build in numbers especially when it comes to budget requests.”

“What it is boiling down to is a good rationale (for spending visitor amenity funds),” Beaucaire told the committee. “… this is why we decided to do it this way. It has to be rational. It can’t be, “Ya, I think it’s 50 percent’ when it comes to the number of visitors.”

The majority of Yachats’ general fund budget comes from lodging taxes. It collected $1.06 million in fiscal 2018-19 and because of a variety of old and new state spending formulas must spend 39 percent of that on tourism-related activities.

But that’s where implementing the law – and various interpretations of it – gets murky.

What’s a visitor to Yachats? Is it someone from Waldport coming to a crafts fair and eating lunch at the Drift Inn? The law appears to say that a visitor is classified as someone from 50 miles away or who stays overnight in local lodging.

And what’s a tourist-related facility? According a guide from the League of Oregon Cities, they are conference centers, convention centers, visitor information centers, or “other improved real property that has a useful life of 10 or more years and has a substantial purpose of supporting tourism or accommodating tourist activities.”

But the League’s advice to cities on gray areas of the law? Talk to your lawyer.

“Many local governments — especially those that tend to accommodate more tourists than residents — question whether infrastructure such as sewers or roads qualify as ‘tourism-related facilities,’” the League says in a guide to transient lodging taxes. “That is an open legal question.”

Mayor John Moore said he thought the city could “easily show” there are more tourists in Yachats, population 745, than locals during much of the year.

In the past, many motel owners have been critical of how the city allocates visitor amenities funds or how the Yachats Visitors Center, overseen by the Yachats Chamber of Commerce, advertised to attract tourists. But several of them now are trying to revitalize the chamber and are working to create a more active marketing committee.

But, Drew Roslund, partner in the Overleaf Lodge and Fireside Motel, has repeatedly told the council that he believes it is violating state law on use of lodging taxes on some city projects, but especially on a recently approved expansion of the library. The city has authorized spending $60,000 in lodging taxes on the $370,000 expansion and remodel.

“We’re being asked to build a defense against something we don’t know is going to happen,” said John Purcell, a member of the city’s Parks & Commons Commission.