By: Lydia Crawley The Parsons Advocate
After months of struggles, emails, phone calls and legal threats, the Town of Davis and Tucker County have finally received the data they require from Airbnb.
The data has been needed by the entities to distribute Hotel/Motel Tax monies between the County and the Town of Davis. Airbnb only uses the zip codes of their addresses to collect and distribute the money collected which has led to County money being sent to the Town of Davis for years.
The County and the Town of Davis have tried repeatedly to remedy the situation with the company to no avail. In the past, the company has sent reams of unusable data to the municipal entities which has added to the frustration.
Recently, Town of Davis Mayor Al Tomson has sent a series of correspondences to the company demanding useful data in a timely manner so that the Town and the County can accurately and quickly disseminate the monies that are being sent to the Town. After several attempts with little to no response from the company, Mayor Tomson consulted with the County’s Prosecuting Attorney Savannah Hull Wilkins. In the last correspondence, Mayor Tomson said the matter would be put before the West Virginia Attorney General if no satisfaction was obtained. The last correspondence yielded results.
Tucker County Administrator Sheila DeVilder confirmed at the May 14th Tucker County Commission meeting that the County had received 18 to 20 months of data from Airbnb. The data contains 150,000 to 200,000 entries to be disseminated over the entire County. DeVilder said she is working on dividing the entries between the municipalities in the County currently.
The end goal, DeVilder said, is for the County to recoup funds being held by the Town of Davis that was sent to them by Airbnb in error based on the company’s policy of issuing checks based on zip code alone versus physical locations.
Mayor Tomson also confirmed the receipt of the data during a meeting of the Town of Davis Council May 14th. Tomson said that the data that he had looked at thus far had worked as expected.
“It looks like they are cooperating with us,” Tomson said. “They gave us data, its working. So we will keep processing those things the way we need to.”
