City Promotion Tax
Dear Editor: According to your Friday edition the city Administrator of Sitka, Mark Gorman, is giving $300,000 of OUR TAX MONEY away for an advertising campaign/marketing program.
All taxes should go into the Sitka general tax fund (no matter their source) and therefore those TAXES BELONG TO ALL THE PEOPLE of Sitka.
Spending tax money on special interest groups (businesses) does not benefit most citizens of Sitka.
My understanding is that the City of Sitka is underfunded to the point of taking the sales tax exemption away from senior citizens. There has also been the threat of raising property tax millage rate.
Does this make sense to anyone but an administrator? The taxes businesses pay should be spent on support of city infrastructure. It is only the tourist business community who benefit from advertising/promoting Sitka and they should be paying for the advertising OUT OF THEIR OWN DEEP POCKETS.
At the present time TOURISM DOES NOT PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE. How do I know this? Before tourism property taxes were 4 mils ($4 per thousand valuation). Now they are 6 mils and the spending of the assembly threatens to bankrupt us at that rate. Before tourism came to town, sales tax was 5 percent all year with seniors exempted. We weren’t in debt up to our eyeballs from projects we don’t need. Assembly doesn’t even know how far we are in debt; they just spend.
Please don’t throw our money away on advertising, Mr. Gorman. I urge you to support the police, fireman and schools and build good roads like governments are supposed to do.
Bill Marx, Sitka
P.S. As I’ve said before ... Sitka city government is “of business, for business and by business.”
