Tourists are lowering our tax bills
Published April 17, 2014
Editorial by Asheville Citizen-Times, April 15, 2014.
Next time you find yourself caught behind a slow-moving out-of-state car filled with rubber-necking tourists, temper your displeasure. Those people are lowering your tax bills.
To be precise, according to a study compiled for the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area by students in Steve Morse’s class in Hospitality and Tourism Strategies at Western Carolina University, tourists to the mountains left behind $2.39 billion in 2012, generating $176 million in local and state taxes and supporting some 30,000 people.
Buncombe County benefited to the tune of $834.24 million in direct tourist spending, $174.71 million in worker income, $69 million in combined state and local taxes and 9,360 jobs. The county’s 101,381 households saved an average of $601 in local and state taxes.
The impact was even greater in rural Swain, the region’s No. 2 tourism county with $293.06 million in direct tourist spending. This spending produced $79.75 million in worker income, $22.85 million in combined state and local taxes, and 3,340 jobs. The average tax savings for Swain’s 5,476 households was $2,605.
Spending in other counties ranged from $218.44 million in Henderson to $12.29 million in Clay. Others, in millions: Rutherford, $149.69; Macon, $135.76; Haywood, $126.35; Avery, $103.73; Transylvania, $80.92; Burke, $80.46; Jackson, $69.55; McDowell, $49.06; Cherokee, $35.33; Madison, $32.22; Yancey, $31.69; Graham, $24.84; Polk, $22.63; Mitchell, $20.96.
It may seem obvious, but one of the most important things in compiling accurate tourism data is deciding who is a tourist. “We define tourists as either day-trippers or overnighters who come to your county from more than 50 miles away for business or leisure purposes,” Morse said.
“We do not include people from within your county, because those are local people spending local dollars they would be spending anyway,” he added.
“We also are looking at the average of tourist dollars spent on the average day. An average day is not the Fourth of July when everything is packed, and it’s not Wednesday of the third week in February when no one is visiting.”
Tourism has benefits beyond the purely financial, Carole Simm wrote in USA Today. “Tourism encourages the preservation of traditional customs, handicrafts and festivals that might otherwise have been allowed to wane, and it creates civic pride,” she wrote.
We certainly have seen these benefits in the mountains. Hardly a day passes without a news story about some individual or group seeking to preserve mountain traditions. These people are proud of what they do.
And then there are environmental benefits. “Tourism — particularly nature and ecotourism — helps promote conservation of wildlife and natural resources,” Simm wrote. That is hardly news here, where millions visit every year because of our mountains’ natural beauty. For us, environmental preservation is economic survival.
There are, of course, negatives as well. Probably the greatest danger is overdevelopment that changes the character of the area. Simm notes that escalating land values can push out locals and that resources can be overused.
Another criticism is that the industry creates only low-wage jobs. Not so, Morse said. “That’s like saying that everyone who works in a hospital is an orderly,” he said. Restaurants have chefs and managers as well as wait staff. Well-paid professionals develop websites or devise advertising.
The days in which manufacturing and farming can support our communities are in the past. Both will remain important, but a major driver of economic growth will be the use of our natural resources to lure visitors who will leave some of their money behind. Among other things, it cuts our tax bills.
