Cassian town board approached about room tax

The Cassian town board is weighing the possibility of entering into a room tax agreement with the Tomahawk Regional Chamber of Commerce (TRCOC).

The topic came up at the town board’s November meeting and Charis Lau, the TRCOC’s executive director and a resident of Cassian, attended to introduce the topic.

She returned for the Dec. 8 town board meeting to provide more background and answer questions. 

Town chairman Ed Phebus opened the discussion by informing town supervisors Keith Gee and Rod Randolph and those in the audience he’d met with Lau on Dec. 5. 

“She was here at the last meeting and I sent you guys some information,” he told Gee and Randolph. “I just wanted to get an idea if this is something we want to do, go forward with it.”

“I can answer questions,” Lau said. “I’m community-focused as versus tourism-focused so I want you guys to utilize what you already have and not necessarily build up more. I want to make sure people are staying in those rooms and take advantage of what Rondele (Ranch) has in place because they just kind of all came in and did their thing and now we can tax those people staying in there.”

Lau said the chamber would get 70 percent of the room tax revenue and the town would get 30 percent. 

“Uninhibited as the town and then I would utilize it to promote events, the chicken barbecue, all those kinds of things that happen here to bring people to make the community stronger,” she said. 

“If we wanted her to do that,” Phebus said. 

Lau said she did a rough calculation of how many rooms are available for lodging in Cassian which she said was the “third largest in the area,” an area that didn’t include Minocqua but does include Tomahawk and other small towns near it. 

“You guys have roughly 75 rooms between all the rentals and it (room tax rate) goes by room so you’re probably looking at, I don’t know, six to seven percent room tax on that,” she said. “$15,000 a year. $15,000 to $20,000 depending on occupancy level and I would like to fill those rooms for you. You might as well fill them so they like us and come back.”

Randolph asked if this would be something that the town would enter into a contract to have done. 

“You would just contract with me and my organization, a non-profit, and I would do it for you and help with the website to help promote businesses,” Lau said. “That is the one contract you would have. It would be with us and would be open-ended. You could cancel it if you didn’t want to do it. You guys kind of dictate.”

She said the town could enter into a contract with “any designated marketing organization.”

“51 percent of what they do has to go for transient marketing,” Lau said. “So, the tourism here and not the people from here. I spend about 70 percent of my budget outside of this. Minocqua does it, Rhinelander does it. It’s just who you want to contract with.”

She said the TRCOC has “a lot of members up here” in the Cassian area.

“I live here,” Lau said. “I’m a little bit different ... my unofficial slogan is ‘Not Minocqua’ because I’m not here for the massive tourism numbers. I’m here for the communities. I want the communities to thrive but I want people to fall in love with where they’re staying.”

Rhinelander, she said, is “very chamber-focused” and she works with Rhinelander chamber of commerce staff. 

Even so, Lau said she believes Cassian and the TRCOC “would be a good partnership because of what we’re looking to do.”

“We’re completely re-doing how our organization is structured and no longer having membership fees,” she said. “I don’t want it to be a club. I want it to support entire communities. Here, Nokomis, I was just at the Bradley town meeting. I’d like to see everybody thrive.”

Randolph asked what other towns are under contract with the TRCOC. 

“The town of King, the city of Tomahawk and the town of Bradley,” Lau said. “We’re writing it (the contract) in the next month.”

She said she will also be talking to the Nokomis town board. 

After some more discussion, which included questions about the room tax process itself and the topic of real estate companies buying homes and turning them into short term rentals and harming the housing market, Phebus made a motion to table the matter until the January town board meeting.

“So you guys can look at it more,” he said to Gee and Randolph. 

Keeping what’s there

After the meeting, Phebus said as part of his own looking into the possibilities of a room tax for Cassian, he’d “like to see what the county’s thinking and stuff like that.”

“It’s all about trying to control the growth of our town and I know Rondele Ranch having a bunch of rentals and quite a few other people having rental properties that doesn’t really bring anything into Cassian,” he said. “It brings tax dollars and people coming and spending money but if there’s a way we can capture some extra money ... some of the maintenance that we have to keep up on, I think we should try to recover some of the revenue.”

Phebus said he doesn’t “want to sell Cassian” and wants to keep the existing businesses but the additional revenue for the town could be beneficial “so we can maybe do other things like improve roads or whatever.”

He said the previous town board pushed back on room tax.

“They didn’t want anything to do with any of it,” Phebus said. “I look at it from a different perspective; if we’re not going to do it, somebody’s going to do it and capture that revenue somehow.”

Brian Jopek may be reached via email at [email protected].