Port Authority seeking hotel tax increase

Revenue to fund lakefront projects

Lake County’s port authority is asking the county commissioners to approve the increase of the hotel bed tax that would be earmarked for lakefront improvement projects.

The Lake County Ohio Port and Economic Development Authority’s Executive Director Mark Rantala and the longest tenured board member Chris Madison attended the most recent commissioners meeting to ask them to consider raising the bed tax from 3 percent to 5 percent.

“Essentially what this does is allow the commissioners to levy a 2 percent on additional use tax,” Madison said at the meeting. “So if you’re buying a room in Lake County, you would pay an additional 2 percent of the cost of the hotel room. That money would exclusively be used to fund lakeshore improvement projects.”

The port authority asked the commissioners last year to consider the increase, but the commissioners never voted on a motion.

Madison said one of the directives at the port authority is to “do whatever they can to implement a long term lakefront development plan.” The port authority itself was born a decade ago out of a costal plan.

“There are a number of good projects to put together for economic development, but the funding for that has always been elusive,” he said.

This particular tax would generally be paid for by visitors to the county rather than residents, Madison said.

The commissioners would have final say on what projects get funded.

Commissioner Daniel P. Troy asked the present port authority officials for an example of what could be funded under this tax increase.

“I’m always averse to saying ‘let’s create a pot of money and then find out down the road what we’re going to spend it on,’” Troy said.

For the past few years, there’s

been talk of building a resort hotel in Fairport Harbor. Madison said there’s a piece of property that might become available.

“It would be very, very nice to acquire,” he said. “That would expand the footprint of this potential hotel development and frankly make it a lot more palatable to the developers coming in.”

Rantala said they’ve identified three or four projects that “could come to the surface quickly.” He added they haven’t solicited all the lakefront communities, because the port authority doesn’t want to raise their expectations when the fate of the tax increase is yet to be determined.

The port’s executive director reiterated that the funds can only be used for lakefront capital projects.

The legislation requires that the projects have to be “port projects.” Meaning the port authority has to finance it, own it or are in some other way involved in the project, Rantala said. The projects have to be within a mile of the lakefront.

Projects funded by the tax could be as simple as a kayak launch or breakwater improvement, Rantala said.

If approved, the tax would bring in an estimated $500,000 annually.

Madison said their expectation is to create a scoring system for all potential projects.

“At the end of the day, what we’re looking to do with these funds is spend them in a way that enhances our lakefront,” he said. “One of the reasons we have this charge to develop the lakefront is we consider that really our front yard. We’d like to see the lake become a much more attractive recreational area for our residents and to visitors to our county.”

Ashtabula County has a five percent hotel bed tax and Cuyahoga County has a 5.5 percent tax with Cleveland levying an additional 3 percent on top of that for lodgers in its city.