City denies revenue boost to chamber

The Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce won't get a boost in room tax revenue from the City of Sisters -- and the organization is sorely disappointed.

The Sisters City Council turned down a budget request by the chamber for a bigger share of the Transient Room Tax, an 8 percent surcharge on each motel room rented in the city.

Chamber president Jeff Jones stated that the "City of Sisters currently has the region's highest room tax (8 percent) and the lowest share going to the Chamber of Commerce (25 percent)."

He proposes that the chamber share of the revenue be raised to 33.3 percent.

The council argued that the city could not justify the boost when local tax payers are already footing the bill for a high level of services demanded by the tourist trade.

Mayor Steve Wilson said that the current council has done an excellent job of promoting tourism and he and the council are "extremely disappointed" by the chamber's focus on this single issue.

"The fallacy of the room tax debate," Wilson said, "is that they're only looking at one single item of revenue. If you look at the actual percentage of the city's funds that the Sisters community dedicates to tourism, the proportionality is much more than that of surrounding communities -- far in excess of room tax figures."

Last week, in a letter to the mayor, city council and city manager, Chamber President Jeff Jones called the denial "unacceptable."

"Given that our local economy is so tourist driven, one would believe that the city would want the chamber, as the promotional hub of the area, to be at least as economically viable as our counterparts in adjacent communities -- evidently not," Jones' letter stated.

According to the chamber's own figures, the Redmond Chamber receives a straight one-third of a 7.5 percent tax.

The Prineville Chamber gets 40 percent, but there is a cap that actually worked out to 27.3 percent last year. The Bend Chamber, on the other hand, receives a specified allocation which amounted to 24.7 percent for the 1998-99 period.

Testifying before the city council, Jones said that the chamber "self-generates" 60 percent of its budget every year through various events and fund-raisers.

"We currently cannot continue to operate self-generating that amount of our budget," he said. "It puts the chamber in a very perilous position every year."

According to Wilson, the city is not opposed to helping the chamber, but the council wants to be able to tell voters specifically where their dollars went.

"We didn't close the door on additional funding for the chamber," Wilson said. "We just want to be part of the decision-making process on how those additional funds are spent. We have accountability to our citizens."

The Sisters chamber emphasized its disagreement at the Thursday, June 8, council meeting, formally opposing the city budget. The budget passed anyway.

Wilson said he wishes that the chamber "would take the time to sit down with the council through the budget meetings, rather than doing a hit and run and fixating on the single issue of the room tax.

"If they did take the time," he said, "they would develop a better understanding of the entire process.