Conversations regarding a restaurant and tourism tax in Bellevue, which some city restaurant owners have spoken out against, continued at Wednesday’s council meeting.
The city is floating the idea of a 1% to 1.5% tax, which would be added on top of Kentucky’s 6% sales tax at restaurants in Bellevue. The money that the tax would generate could only go toward tourism, and the city would be required to create a tourism board that would manage the revenue. The idea was initially brought forward to help rehabilitate the Marianne Theater, which the city owns.
The tax has only been a topic of discussion during city meetings and has not been read in an official capacity for a vote. Bellevue City Administrator Frank Warnock said he is in the process of speaking with other Kentucky cities that have the tax to prepare a presentation for a future meeting.
Warnock initially brought up the idea during a March city council meeting, where he said the city on the “conservative end” makes $20 million a year from its restaurants, and a 1% tourism tax would raise roughly $200,000 more a year. During the September council meeting, Bellevue Council member Ryan Salzman said the city receives no benefit from sales tax, and the tourism tax would give them direct benefits.
President of the Northern Kentucky Restaurant Association, Tim Eversole, told LINK nky that he was against a restaurant/tourism tax. Eversole, 70, said cities across the state have the tax, and Georgetown is the closest city to Northern Kentucky with the tax.
Warnock said at the meeting that he had spoken with Eversole and will continue to discuss with him as conversations progress.
One city with the tax Warnock said he has visited was Beaver Dam, Kentucky. He said he spoke with the owner of the bed and breakfast where he stayed, who said they have a 3% restaurant/tourism tax, the highest percentage the state allows.
“What they’ve done there is they’ve created a large concert venue, and it’s a regional hub and economic development hub for the area,” Warnock said. “The gal that I spoke with at the bed and breakfast said when they have events there, her whole place is filled up.”
For Bellevue, the money from the tax could be bonded to repair the Marianne Theater, Warnock said at a March meeting, to make it available for community use.
At the Sept. 9 meeting, Warnock said the city met with urban growth firm Yard & Company to discuss a proposal for the theater. The company has presented its idea to the council for rehabilitation.
Some people have been critical of the city for maintaining ownership of the theater and not selling it. During Wednesday’s meeting, Salzman said the cost isn’t in selling or transferring the building; it’s in the renovations (estimated at $1.5 million). Because of that, he said if it was sold, it would most likely not be maintained for public use—something he said has been the most consistent request to him by the community in his almost nine years on the council.
“There are people who would take the Marianne and scrape it to the ground and build something else there,” he said. “But if you want it to be publicly usable, we will have to put significant public funds into it. Period. Any insinuation that we can just sell it and have public use out of it is untrue.”
Larry Brondhaver, who owns Avenue Brew in Bellevue with his wife, Christine, spoke against the tax at last month’s council meeting. He asked the council if they had spoken to anyone who had implemented the tax this year, which Warnock said they had not.
Brondhaver said restaurants are one of the hardest businesses to run right now and said his business is currently down 30%.
“If you all would consider a tax right now of any kind, I hope you’ll look at other places that have put it in this year and see what happened,” Brondhaver said at the September meeting. “It’s going to be ugly for all of us if you start adding more tax onto our bill. It will hurt tips; it will hurt everything.”
Eversole also said he thought that tipped employees would suffer the consequences of the tax.
Brondhaver said most of his customers are local—an idea that Eversole spoke on.
“When you think about it, Bellevue is not a city that has a huge tourism market,” Eversole said. “They don’t have huge restaurants that people flock to the city for—I don’t mean to say that in a negative way, they have lots of nice restaurants, but what they’re really doing is taxing the local residents.”
Charlie Zimmerman, owner of Three Spirits Tavern, also spoke at last month’s meeting and agreed that they mostly serve Bellevue residents, not tourists, and therefore would be taxing themselves.
“Some of us here can afford that little bit of extra tax, but a lot of our neighbors can’t,” Zimmerman said.
He encouraged the city to have one-on-one conversations with all business owners and let them give the city ideas. Warnock said the city would go to all the restaurant owners and discuss it with them.
Tim Morgan from Schneider’s Sweet Shop was the last person to speak against the tax at September’s meeting. No business owners addressed the council about it at Wednesday’s meeting.
