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n Monday evening, Mammoth Lakes Town Councilmembers Chris Bubser and John Wentworth led a “community meeting” promoting Ballot Measure L, which seeks to increase the Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) by 2 points (or 15.3%) over the next 10 years.
They were joined by, among others, Mammoth Lakes Town Manager Rob Patterson, Mono County Supervisor Lynda Salcido and Mono County Board of Education Vice President Drea Perry. There were approximately 20 attendees.
The event was put on by the committee, “Yes For Mammoth Lakes.” The event was announced on the committee’s Facebook page and on a flyer at the post office.
The Facebook event post initially received thirteen generally negative comments – all of which were deleted by Monday afternoon.
Bubser, who said she was there in her “personal capacity,” said she’d helped create the committee with leftover campaign funds and fundraising.
“We had to follow all the FPPC rules and filings and it’s a total pain in the butt, but we’re doing this because we think it’s the best thing for our town,” Bubser said. “And that’s why` it’s so frustrating to just get the blowback and the criticism.”
TOT (aka room tax) is currently set at 13% and its revenues make up about 70% of the General Fund.
Last year, TOT receipts were approximately $27 million, or $9 million more than budget.
Measure L assumes two extra points, at $2 million per point (extrapolating out what a point currently generates) will gross an additional $4 million annually.
The stated needs for Measure L are housing, disaster preparedness, maintaining public areas, and repairing infrastructure.
It is being floated as a general tax, so Mammoth’s council can actually spend the money however it chooses.
But the emphasis has decidely been on housing.
The website (yes4mammothlakes.com) boasts that tourists will pay the fee, the funds will stay local, and town politicians will be held accountable through transparency to the public and independent audits, all with an expiration date of 2034.
“We know that it’s really going to take 10 years to even get what’s currently in the pipeline for housing done,” Bubser said. “ If we did anything shorter we wouldn’t meet our goals.”
Bubser said the Housing Now! program needs almost $76.5 million dollars to accomplish its plans in the next decade.
Mammoth’s council had considered running the ballot question as a special tax (which would guarantee the money is spent on housing versus merely promised) but special taxes require two thirds of voter support to approve.
Bubser was extremely frustrated at the event because of the backlash the council has received throughout her tenure, she said
“You get kind of mad when people are yelling at you all the time that everything’s terrible and it’s like, well what have you done?,” she told me, hands raised plaintively skyward.
There are a lot of misconceptions about TOT, she said. So, I sat down with Bubser and Town Manager Patterson in the town offices on Tuesday to discuss the town budget.
In 2023-2024, the town budgeted $18 million dollars of TOT funds, $2 million more than the previous year. Revenue came in at $27 million.
The budget is always conservative and assumes the worst case scenario, Patterson said. The last three years have been an anomaly because of the post COVID-19 travel surge, which was a boon for Mammoth and resort towns all over the west.
For sake of comparison, the Town budgeted $13.5 million in TOT revenue from FY 2019-20, and it came in at $15.9M. The following year, budget was $11.2M and revenue was $16.5M.
In the 2021-22 fiscal year, the Town generated a whopping $26.6 million in TOT, $12.1 million over budget.
Thank you Covid.
In the “Snowmageddon” year of 2022-23, the town had its best ever year for TOT revenue – $29.5 million.
It had budgeted $16 million.
It’s impossible to tell exactly how the coming years will play out, but Patterson predicts the town will see decreased (return to normal) TOT generation unless the rate is increased.
The 2024-2025 budget is $18.5 million with anticipated revenue to sit around $25 million. If Measure L passes, the $4 million will be added to budget, making it $22.5M.
At the meeting, an attendee asked Councilman Wentworth why the town doesn’t allocate marketing dollars towards housing instead of raising the TOT rate.
“There’s this narrative that we spend millions of dollars on marketing and that is a risk and it’s a fallacious assumption,” Wentworth answered.
The marketing dollars people assume are being used by the town are Tourism Business Improvement District (TBID) tax dollars, not TOT, he said. While TBID does support tourism, and, consequently, drive up TOT revenue, it is a different pot of money.
TBID was introduced in fiscal year 2014-15 and is a tax that businesses apply in an effort to improve and promote the tourism experience in Mammoth Lakes. TBID money is managed by Mammoth Lakes Tourism, not the town, Bubser said.
Mammoth’s Council had traditionally also allocated 2.35 points of TOT to Mammoth Lakes Tourism but with the explosion in TOT revenue, that number has been reduced to a flat or set amount, approximately $2 million annually from room tax receipts.
The remainder of what used to go directly to MLT from TOT now gets tossed into a ‘tourism reserve.’ In 2023-2024, that money was used for various items, but for the most part, the Town skims excess, unallocated funds from the tourism reserve and shovels them towards the Housing Now! program.
