The Mountain Messenger: Where Have All the Tourists Gone?

Published on Oct 7, 2008 - 6:52:23 AM

By: Nuke Brunswick, The Mountain Messenger

NEVADA CITY - As this tourist town's summer draws to a close the statistics are scary. Nevada City's shares of both sales taxes and transient occupancy taxes (TOT) are shrinking big time.

In the 2006-07 fiscal year (July through June) sales taxes brought the city $1.1 million. The following year that figure shriveled to $870,830 - a quarter million dollar dump. And that's just a fraction of the dollars that didn't end up in cash registers.

The TOT amount collected by Nevada City in 06-07 was $344,443. That dropped a year later to $294,215 - a $50,000 loss.

These figures come to us from the Nevada City Chamber of Commerce, which gets them from the City. While the stats don't cover this summer's business they show a downward trend that undoubtedly continues to grow. (The Chamber gets eight percent of the TOT. The decline means less muscle for the Chamber to use attracting visitors and stimulating the economy.)

The business death toll this fall was high, most visibly among restaurants that depend on that weekend influx of traveling dollars to make their ink black. A couple of weeks ago the Stonehouse bar and restaurant shut its doors for good and now the building is for sale. (The bright side of the coin is that Friar Tuck's bar and restaurant is busier now with the Stonehouse competition gone.)

This week, long-time downtown eatery Country Rose put the padlock in place. Mountain Song clothiers on Pine Street is having a sale and then will hang it up for good.

Broad Street Furnishings is gone, ugly signs and all. Empty windows in the old corral. And those pesky non-sales-tax-paying real estate offices are disappearing, although their FOR LEASE signs are proliferating.

One empty window downtown has a list of businesses that supported creation of a Business Improvement District (later renamed "Downtown Association"). Eighteen of them, now all gone.

"I think what's happening here is happening all over the world," Cathy Whittlesey, Executive Manager of the Nevada City Chamber of Commerce, says, speaking of the local economy.

Sky-high rents being charged for retail space in downtown Nevada City make high-ticket tourist-oriented offerings the only way for a retailer to survive. A cheap gasoline philosophy that just isn't working any more.

The money shows that occupancy rates at hotels and motels are down. So far down, in fact, that the Northern Queen has announced plans to convert about half of its rooms to senior long term occupancy, blaming the recession. It's a step that once taken cannot easily be undone.

I wrote at the time of the BID's formation, amid plans for downtown beautification, that the cost of gasoline should be their main concern: "It's quite possible that the town's new BID is leaning over the rail of the Titanic with an ice pick."

Would you like a cocktail with that ice?

Editor's note: The Mountain Messenger, California's oldest weekly newspaper since 1853, is published on Thursdays from Downieville, California.

The Mountain Messenger can be purchased for half a buck at the National Hotel (sidewalk), Nevada City Post Office (sidewalk), Nevada City SPD (outside), Nevada City Express Mart (outside) and in front of Safeway, Brunswick area.

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