Did Caroline County lose track of $1,300,000 in tax revenue? Correction/Clarification: Kathy Beard misquoted by The Caroline [Lack of] Progress.

Read the follow up post.

The original post can be read below in its original form:

That, or our astute tourism manager doesn’t know how much money tourism brings into the county (The Caroline Progress):

Kathy Beard, County Director of Tourism, spoke about the role tourism plays in county economics. Beard stated that more than $70 million dollars were spent on tourism related industry in Caroline in 2007, and $1.6 million came back to the county in the form of transient occupancy taxes.

$1,600,000 in transient occupancy taxes (TOT) — that’s the hotel tax for the uninitiated — in 2007?

Let’s see, according to the proposed FY07-08 budget (p. 193), in the second half of the 2007 calendar year, the county only brought in $150,719 in TOT.

Assuming that the county brought in the same amount during the first half of the ’07 calendar year (probably not, but let’s assume), that means a total of $301,438 during the whole calendar year.

So, that leaves three possibilities (I’m leaning towards option #2):

1. The county “lost” $1,300,000 in tax revenue.
2. Kathy Beard doesn’t know jack about how much money comes into the county, and decided to claim a figure more than five fold higher than the actual number.
3. She was misquoted (always a possibilities with The Caroline [Lack of] Progress).

In other funny stuff from the Economic Development Office, you gotta love the fact that the e-mail link to Director Gary Wilson that is on the Economic Development Office’s homepage doesn’t even work.

How bad is it for an Economic Development Office to not even have a functioning e-mail link to the Director?