Residents should get say in tax

The Durango Herald’s Jan. 21 story on the City’s audit of Visit Durango (VD)’s use of public funds leaves the impression that there was no evidence of misuse or conflicts of interest. The impression is misleading, because the audit was not designed to find such evidence.

The audit did find that VD lacked basic internal controls for financial management but identified only some overpayments for mileage and tips, missing documentation, and the like. Why? One reason is that VD didn’t keep good records, so the auditors couldn’t say how large chunks of money were spent. Another reason is that the City limited the audit to 20 bank disbursements to 11 vendors – some hand-selected by the City – and a small sample of purchases through a card-based payment system that were made during a 10- month period in 2024.

Remember that since 2022, VD spent millions of public dollars; the audit covered only a fraction of that. Nor did the audit examine VD’s trips to Turkey, Mexico and New Zealand for the purpose of “recruit[ing] diverse visitors.” We still don’t know who went, what they did, how much they spent or what they spent it on. The audit also failed to examine VD’s use of lodger’s tax money to benefit businesses that VD’s board members owned or worked for.  

Some undoubtedly will argue that the whole matter is water under the bridge now that the City has decided to absorb VD. That misses the point. The lodger’s tax is the public’s money, and it was imposed for the benefit of the entire community, not a single sector of the economy, and certainly not for the benefit of a few businesses.

Since the tax was collected, VD received the lion’s share of the money and used it to promote tourism. Only a fraction went to addressing the negative impacts. When faced with its own survey showing that a majority of city residents wanted to rebalance the allocation to address these impacts, the outgoing City Council in 2023 punted, reasoning that the incoming council should decide how to proceed. But since then, the council has said little about it.

Durango residents are not alone in wanting their elected officials to address the negative impacts of tourism. Since 2022, when voters were authorized to redirect lodger’s tax money from marketing to the negative impacts of tourism, they did so in nine of the 10 Colorado counties given the choice, including La Plata County.

Now there’s another opportunity to say how the City’s lodger’s tax money should be spent. In coming weeks, the City will introduce an ordinance to establish a commission to oversee tourism marketing. This commission could represent the community or it could be controlled by the same self-interested clique. The citizen survey was a missed opportunity for the City to address the negative impacts of tourism. The audit was a missed opportunity for the City to be transparent about spending the public’s money. The City Council now has a third opportunity to show that it intends to use the lodger’s tax for the benefit of the community as a whole.

– Eric Ames, Durango