By EDWARD HUSAR
Herald-Whig Staff Writer
The city of Quincy is planning "adversarial" action against a local hotel that is more than $50,000 behind in turning over hotel-motel tax collections.
City officials declined to identify the hotel, but the Herald-Whig has learned it is Country Inn & amp; Suites, 110 N. 54th.
"We have one licensee who is fundamentally not in compliance right now," City Attorney Tony Cameron said this week.
Cameron said the licensee only turned in monthly hotel-motel taxes for four full months in 2008.
"Their position is that they owe us an amount in excess of $50,000," he said.
Cameron said the city has been undertaking some "fairly benign" steps to encourage the licensee to get caught up on its overdue tax payments. However, Cameron said, the city's Legal Department has now "exhausted our informal steps."
"We will not state publicly what steps we will take next, but we will tell you that we have told the licensee what they can expect and that our next two or three steps will be adversarial in nature," he said.
The hotel-motel tax of 8 percent is paid by patrons for each night they stay in a local hotel. Operators are licensees of the city and collect the tax on behalf of the city. They are obligated to hold the taxes in trust until the revenue is turned over to the city treasurer along with a completed monthly return declaring how much was collected.
In this case, Cameron said, the "noncompliant licensee" submitted returns and turned over taxes for the first three months of 2008 and "just recently" filed additional returns for the remaining months of 2008. However, the licensee only turned over a full month of tax collections for December, leaving prior months unpaid.
"At least seven months of 2008 were unpaid, and we just recently got returns for those months," he said.
The licensee also by now should have remitted hotel-motel taxes for the first two months of 2009, but Cameron declined to say if those taxes have been turned in.
"I don't really want to talk about 2009 because we haven't remediated with the licensee on anything involving 2009," he said. "Anything we do in terms of enforcement for now is going to be focused on 2008."
Cameron acknowledged that only one licensee in Quincy "is fundamentally not in compliance right now."
Herald-Whig stories appearing in May and June 2008 reported receiving confirmation from the city -- in response to a Freedom of Information request -- that the Country Inn & amp; Suites was delinquent in its hotel-motel tax payments for early 2008.
Mike Hill, a managing member of Quincy Hotels LLC, which owns and operates the facility, told The Herald-Whig that the hotel is "financially stable" and that he expected it would get caught up soon on its hotel-motel tax payments. He said at that time that the hotel had not paid its taxes because of computer system problems.
Hill did not respond to telephone calls this week.
The hotel-motel tax is a primary source of income for the Oakley-Lindsay Center. The Quincy Civic Center Authority, which oversees the OLC, also gives some of the hotel-motel revenue to the Quincy Convention and Visitors Bureau. The amount given to the QCVB in the past fiscal year was $80,000.
The tax generated a record $728,374 in 2008, according to figures compiled by the OLC. That's up 7.6 percent from 2007 collections.
Rob Ebbing, director of the OLC, said any tax funds not turned over by a "noncompliant licensee" impacts the OLC, which has faced tight financing in recent years.
"If someone is not turning that over to the city and keeping it in their own coffers for their own use, I would think the other hotels would be extremely upset along with the city and us and the CVB," Ebbing said.
-- ehusar@whig.com/221-3378
