Bed Tax Receipts Up

For the 12th month in a row, the City of Santa Barbara has posted bed tax receipts higher than the year before. This January’s were nominally higher than last year’s—by about $6,000—and for the first seven months of the current fiscal year, the increase has been by $607,000. It remains impossible to tell with any precision what difference this year’s Film Festival had on the bed tax numbers, but city number crunchers believe it was positive. January’s bed tax revenue was 0.9 percent higher than last January’s, a number that looks smaller because last year City Hall began collecting bed taxes from private homeowners who rented out their properties as vacation rentals. That action led to a spike in payments last January of $123,000.