Legislature to consider hotel tax increase on Thursday

Montauk hoteliers are furious that a proposed bill that would significantly increase the hotel and motel tax in Suffolk County, which had been scheduled for a vote three weeks from now, will appear before the County Legislature on Thursday.

The measure would increase the tax from 0.75 percent of the daily rental rate per room to 3 percent.

The timetable was moved forward after Legislator William Lindsay of Islip was able to get enough votes to release the bill from committee.

Mr. Lindsay represents the 8th Legislative District, home to the Vanderbilt Museum, which will receive a percentage of the revenue raised by the tax.

“It’s really bad, it comes at a terrible time,” said Legislator Jay Schneiderman of Montauk. “Apparently the county executive has been pushing to get this to the floor, and Bill Lindsay seems to be in quite a hurry to get this thing approved. But the money that’s being collected is helping the Vanderbilt and Walt Whitman Museums and there is no dedicated stream helping the East End, places like the Montauk Lighthouse.”

The majority of Suffolk County’s hotels are located in Mr. Schneiderman’s district, but he said that he had not been consulted when the tax bill was drafted. “They could have made it a little easier to swallow by bringing in the industry,” Mr. Schneiderman said.

Hotel owners said they felt as though the legislature was trying to rush the bill through, without informing all their constituents, in order to avoid widespread protest. In 2004, the legislature proposed the same tax hike but dropped it after hotel owners organized a successful countywide campaign to explain their opposition.

“They’re trying to keep it under the radar without getting too many people worked up about it,” said Paul Monte, the owner of Gurney’s Inn in Montauk.

Ken Walles, the owner of the Oceanside Beach Resort in Montauk, said that the tax ultimately would be paid mostly by county residents, who, he said, are the most frequent users of East End hotels and motels. “As local legislators, they hide by saying this is a tax that will benefit people in our district, but it’s not going to be paid by people in our area,” Mr. Walles said. But 40 to 50 percent of the visitors to Montauk are from Suffolk County, he said, and at Gurney’s Inn, the percentage is closer to 60, according to Mr. Monte.

Mr. Monte also said that many studies, including one in New York City, had shown that when the government increases the hotel tax, eventually the tourism spending in the area decreases, which decreases sales tax revenues.

“They want to impact all of Suffolk County’s tourism just to support a couple museums and a hole in the county budget and that’s the just the wrong approach, it’s a very short-sighted approach,” said Mr. Monte. “They need to cut county spending, that’s what they need to do.”

Mr. Monte, Mr. Walles and Jim Zaborski, president of the Dune Management Company, were reached in a car on their way to a meeting of the Long Island Convention and Visitors Bureau on Wednesday afternoon. They said that they hoped to rally a group to attend the legislature’s meeting on Thursday morning to speak against the bill.