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Building Butler tourism, with all the bells and whistles
By Ruth Ann Baker Initially, it seemed that the famous bells of Butler might have gotten to people's brains. The Butler County Chamber of Commerce recently proposed a "bed tax" on guests staying overnight in local hotels, motels and other lodgings. The goal is to raise money to promote more tourism. So ... tax them and they will come? That worked for Caesar Augustus about 2,000 years ago, and we got a Christian holiday and an endless shopping season out of it. But Mary and Joseph weren't really tourists, and they never did find a bed. Caesar had the clout of "absolute dictator of the known world" -- slightly more power than your local chamber of commerce -- and he required that people return to their hometowns, not golfing resorts, to pay those taxes. If that happened today, elected officials might want to consider sealing the borders and keeping our former locals here. Instant solution to our population loss. Without the pressing need to launch a world religion, however, taxing tourists to attract them seems a little bit like, "We had to destroy that village in order to save it." A new reporter on this beat, I decided to go to Butler for a few hours as a tourist. That's when I encountered the bells. I parked near the county courthouse, my eventual destination, but detoured down Main Street to see what I could see. Waiting at an intersection to cross the street, I heard a bell ringing somewhere above me. Not a deep, mellifluous chiming, but a sound caused perhaps by the mating of an old-fashioned phone and a fire alarm. The kind of sound that might interrupt a thought like "Taxes are the price we pay for living in a safe, well-ordered society" and turn it into "Taxes are the price others pay to expand our advertising budget." "Oh, the bells!" said Elizabeth Staaf, the county's deputy treasurer. "We're famous for those." They were installed "way, way back" by the Lions Club to enable blind pedestrians to safely cross the town's busiest streets, she said. "Anywhere you go, if you say you're from Butler, people say, 'That's the place where the bells ring at the street corners.' " Just try mentioning that in Cancun. Unfortunately, the bells won't be part of a bed-tax- supported ad campaign. They're on their way out, to be replaced by a more pleasant- sounding "ding." I found the bells disorienting. They made me want to climb a traffic light mast and silence them, a sight that could have ended Butler tourism right then and there. According to National Travel Data Service in Washington, D.C., Butler County takes in about $60 million a year in tourist dollars, making that the second-largest industry in the county, said Linda Harvey, president of the Butler County Chamber of Commerce. "We're not in the business of recommending taxes," Harvey said. "The beauty of this kind of tax is that it doesn't burden local residents." Would it burden the travelers? "It's minimal," Harvey said. "People don't react to it negatively anymore." Recent state legislation raised the allowable rate for a bed tax from 2 to 3 percent, and just a 1 percent bed tax could raise an additional $300,000 a year for the county, Harvey estimated. Would collecting the tax burden local lodging providers? "The state already has all kinds of hoops you have to jump through," said Sheri Hixon, who, with husband Phil, opened The Copper Penny Manor Bed and Breakfast in October. No one knows whether county commissioners would include smaller establishments in the proposed bed tax. They're expected to take up the matter in January. "It'd be a lot of paperwork but, if it promotes tourism, I'd be all for it," Hixon said. Maybe it was the lingering effect of those bells, but this was starting to sound like a not-all-bad idea. Behind the Hixons' inn on Route 68 near the Butler Farm Showgrounds, a new golf course is taking shape. Butler County already has 21 courses -- "more per capita than any other county in the state," Harvey noted. She hopes to promote golfing, antiquing, historical tours and the county's biggest draw -- Moraine State Park -- in an all-encompassing campaign that would encourage visitors to "stay here longer than one night -- turn it into long weekend," she said. "Giving people a coordinated vision of Butler County is one of our ultimate goals," Harvey said. The vision thing. You'd expect
that in a place where they already do so much for the blind. |
