Longmont leans toward creating tourism district with fees on hotels

LONGMONT — Longmont officials this week gave their blessing to a plan to draft ordinances to create and implement a tourism improvement district to raise money to promote the city to out-of-towners.

The “proposed Longmont Tourism Improvement District” would “provide improved, enhanced, additional, or otherwise unavailable tourism-related facilities and services beyond the facilities and services regularly provided by the City of Longmont Lodger’s tax,” a city memo said, by implementing a new 2% fee on “gross short-term room rental revenue for all lodging businesses within the boundaries of the City.”

With certain exceptions, a $200 per night hotel room would increase to $204, with the additional $4 going into the Longmont Tourism Improvement District, or LTID, coffers. 

Without the district “we don’t have the dollars to reach out for new visitors,” Visit Longmont board member Dave Fluegge said.

LTID efforts will “focus on (bringing) new visitors and new revenue into the community,” Visit Longmont executive director Sarah Leonard said. “We know when visitors stay overnight at our hotels, they spend more time and money in our community. This increases visitor spending on sales tax and other fees contributing to the city’s general fund” and at other types of local businesses.

The city will be in charge of collecting the fees from hotel operators on behalf of the LTID, which will pay the city 1% of fees collected to “cover the costs of collection and administration,” a memo said. 

Visit Longmont estimates that the new fee will generate about $456,000 in its first year. Of that, more than half is likely to be earmarked for sales, marketing and communications efforts, according to city documents, with another quarter budgeted for “destination development,” which could be anything from gateway and signage enhancement to arts and cultural events to park improvements.

After a 6-1 vote in favor of directing staff to begin drafting the ordinances to get the LTID off the ground, the district, which would encompass the entirety of Longmont city limits, could be in place as early as April.

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