Does the West Suit You

Hotels Are Our Friends

The Museum Hotel’s plans received their obligatory initial thumping at a recent Planning Commission airing of age old grievances and tropes. The biggest trope being that hotels are our enemy. The only idea more wrong than this is the idea that all tourists subsidize our city budget and are uniformly good for Laguna.

A recent study disclosed that every one of the tourist visitors to Laguna Beach cost the city $4 for municipal services. Without hotel staying tourists, that figure would be $8 a day. There’s almost a million hotel-staying, taxpaying tourist visitors, and about six million nonpaying day visitors a year.

These day visitors cost around $24 million a year. That works out to a $1,000 annual tourist subsidy from every resident in town. Every other city in the world has their businesses paying most of the cost of providing government services, with resident services subsidized by the business activity.

We’ve no room for traditional sources of government income, large generators of sales tax. The Walmarts, Costcos, and other retail giants of the day are all huge tilt up concrete boxes surrounded by acres of pavement full of parked cars. Cities only get 1 percent of their gross sales in taxes. A Walmart doing $100 million in sales only generates $1 million in taxes for the city it is in.

With our special taxes on hotel staying guests, such as the Transient Occupancy Tax and Measure LL taxes, even a Hampton House Hotel, would generate more city income than a couple of Walmarts. Talk about traffic. Which would you rather have? Every dollar we collect from tourists in taxes is a dollar residents don’t have to pay in their property taxes or their rent.

Think of all the things we could do for the residents of Laguna, if we had the money. A real senior center, not being colonized by city offices, or maybe that nice eight-lane Olympic-sized pool we’ve been promised for years both come to mind.

One of the commissioners seemed furfuraceously obtuse when asking what was the marketing theme for a proposed hotel located across the street from our museum, in the heart of the gallery district, and named the Museum Hotel. All of this in a town that cloaks itself in the marketing allure of high culture and art, they decried the absence of “beachyness.”

Let’s not forget the sin of blocking the view of the alley side of some apartments—oh, the horror. It’s going to be a long process.

J.J. Gasparotti moved to Laguna Beach with his family when he was 11 years old. He has loved it ever since.