“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” Tomson said.
By: Lydia Crawley
The Parsons Advocate
The Town of Davis continues to have struggles with Airbnb over the distribution of Hotel/Motel tax funds. Davis Mayor Al Tomson informed the Town Council February 12th that the company continues to make it difficult for the Town to reconcile funds received by the entity. “We have had a continuing issue with Hotel/Motel tax as it is reimbursed from Airbnb,” Tomson said.
Part of the issue comes from a delay in information that is relayed between the entities, according to Tomson. “We get a check,” Tomson said. “We don’t get detail until much later.”
Another issue comes from the fact that the spreadsheet contains thousands of rows of frivolous information for Town staff to sort through, Tomson said. “The detail is very voluminous,” Tomson said. “It’s usually a spreadsheet of a couple thousand rows and it covers three or four months’ worth of checks.”
Tomson said that given the sheer amount of data provided sometimes they are able to reconcile the checks and sometimes they are unsuccessful. “The details are in one big slew and you are supposed to find the right pieces to add up to the checks you receive,” Tomson said. “And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
In an effort to streamline the process, Tomson said he sent an email to Airbnb requesting the information be sent on a monthly basis, instead of the quarterly basis they have been sending it currently. “I sent a letter to Airbnb today, an email, asking them to provide the detail, as they have in the past, but to break it out and to say this detail goes with this check, this detail goes with this check, and so on and so on,” Tomson said. “So we can do our due diligence. We have fiduciary responsibility to make sure that we’re correctly getting the checks processed.”
The information is used to disseminate the portion of the Hotel/Motel tax funds to distribute to the County based on location of the short-term rentals, according to Tomson. “Once we know that, there’s enough information and detail that we can separate what goes to the County Commission and what goes to the Town of Davis,” Tomson said.
Tomson said that the last data received from Airbnb was not able to be reconciled. “We’ve been able to do that in the past on some occasions, but the last bunch that we got, we were not able to reconcile to the checks,” Tomson said.
Tomson said he checked West Virginia Code and found that the information must be provided to the taxing authority monthly in a form usable to the authority. “I continued to do a bit of sleuthing in West Virginia Code and it says the Hotel operators, or Airbnb in this case, must each month prepare and deliver to the taxing authority a return for the preceding month, in a form prescribed by the taxing authority,” Tomson said. “So they have to provide it in a way that the Town of Davis requires it based on West Virginia Code 7-18-10.”
Tomson went on to say that the information should be usable and clear for the purpose of computation, collection and distribution. “Such form shall include all information necessary for the computation, the collection and the subsequent distribution of the tax as the taxing authority may require,” Tomson said.
Tomson said he will wait for a response from Airbnb on the issue, but if he is not satisfied with the response he receives, he has not ruled out legal action on the matter. “So I am going to wait and see what Airbnb writes back to my email,” Tomson said. “But if we don’t get the results we’re looking for, then West Virginia Code will be mentioned and we’ll go from there and we’ll take legal action if we need to because what we are getting right now is untenable. We can’t work with it.”
Mayor Tomson also discussed the status of Short-Term Rentals in the Town of Davis as a whole during the meeting. “We had a number of them before we put in a moratorium,” Tomson said.
The moratorium was lifted following an unsuccessful civic vote on zoning by the Town in June. The Town Council voted to lift the moratorium at the next Council Meeting following the election in June. “And we kept that moratorium in place until we had a vote on zoning and the zoning didn’t pass,” Tomson said.
Tomson said that the Town of Davis has seen an increase of 22 short term rentals since the moratorium was lifted in June. “Before the moratorium we had 44 short term rentals,” Tomson said. “Today we have 66.”