The Natchez Democrat

With the recent opening of the Natchez Convention Center, efforts to lure tourists to town have been in the limelight.

In fact, each time someone plunks down a dollar on anything from shopping to attractions, a tourism tax is levied.

For each night they spend in a hotel or bed-and-breakfast, and every time they eat in a restaurant, they also pay taxes &045;&045; 3 percent for lodging and 1.5 percent for restaurant meals, to be exact.

But once paid, exactly where does all the tax money go?

They go back to running the CVB and paying for facilities &045;&045; but only a small portion to luring more tourists to Natchez.

The local cut of food and lodging taxes &045;&045; about $815,000 last fiscal year and an estimated $837,551 this year &045;&045; goes back to the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The State Tax Commission remits two checks, one for lodging taxes and one for restaurant taxes, to the CVB each month.

&uot;Those taxes go to support tourism and infrastructure that brings additional people to Natchez,&uot; said Tourism Director Walter Tipton.

That boosts local business, since tourists spend an average of $200 a day on food, lodging, attractions and shopping, which &uot;turns over&uot; 1.7 times in the local economy, according to CVB figures.

Tipton said that at this time, the CVB does not anticipate taking any of its funding from the city’s general fund.

Some goes to the city

The largest part of the food and lodging tax proceeds, $381,000 a year, goes to pay a management agreement with the City of Natchez.

Since the agreement was signed in September 1999, the City Clerk’s Office has taken over the responsibility of payroll, vendor payments and other bookkeeping for the CVB.

&uot;That frees us to do what we do best &045;&045; bringing visitors to Natchez,&uot; said Tourism Director Walter Tipton.

That $381,000 a year goes into the city’s general fund, which is mostly used to pay for administration of city departments.

That includes salaries and wages, health insurance for employees and utility costs, said City Clerk Donnie Holloway.

The CVB also pays the city $60,000 a year from the food and lodging tax proceeds for rent on space at the Visitor Reception Center.

That also goes into the city’s general fund, Holloway said.

Together, the management contract payments and Visitor Center rent payments make up only 4 percent of the city’s general fund budget, he added.

With convention center debt

And the CVB pays one-third of the food and lodging tax &045;&045; $271,721 for the 2000-01 fiscal year &045;&045; to the city for debt service on the newly built convention center and work on the community center and city auditorium.

In 1999, $12 million in bonds were issued through the Mississippi Development Bank to fund construction of the convention center, renovations to the city auditorium and buying and renovating the community center.

Those bonds are to be paid back over 20 years.

Once the bonds are paid off, that one-third of food and lodging tax proceeds will go toward convention center operations and repairs, Tipton said.

Getting the word out

The next-highest amount of tax proceeds &045;&045; $77,279 in fiscal 2000-2001 &045;&045; is used as a match for promotion and advertising grants.

&uot;That money goes to such things as marketing and print materials, media buys, Web development and Web sites,&uot; Tipton said.

In that year, that money was matched by $150,000 in grants from the state Department of Tourism.

That amount did not include $136,500 in grants from the department to market cities along the Natchez Trace.

Those grant amounts are projected to decrease to $120,000 and $100,000 this year due to state budget cuts, Tipton said.

All total, &uot;we’ll have about $300,000 this year&uot; for marketing, he added.

Such funds are also matched by money from Natchez Pilgrimage Tours and from local events such as Natchez Pilgrimage Tours, the Great Mississippi River Balloon Race, the Natchez Opera Festival and the Juneteenth Celebration.

Those events also include the Literary and Cinema Celebration and the Natchez City Cemetery’s Angels on the Bluff tour. Such local matches amounted to $77,279 in fiscal 2000-2002.

The CVB gets 12 percent of proceeds from the events for which it sells tickets, Tipton said.

In addition, the CVB sets aside $10,000 of tax proceeds for familiarization, or &uot;FAM,&uot; tours of Natchez for tour guides, travel writers and other tourism professionals.

&uot;We get more benefit from an article in Southern Living than from anything else we do&uot; in terms of bringing visitors to Natchez, Tipton said.

And thanks to meals and rooms donated by local hotels and restaurants for writers, tour guides and the like, &uot;we don’t pay anything for that article&uot; except an occasional meal, he said.