VisitLex wants more of your money. The publicly funded tourism bureau is asking the Urban County Council to approve a new Tourism Improvement District — a 2% assessment on hotel rooms that would funnel an estimated $2.1 million per year into marketing, consultants, and destination branding. Before the Council votes, it should ask a simple question: Where is all the money going now? Because VisitLex won’t say. The bureau is currently requesting 60 business days to hand over two years of credit card statements — a delay that would conveniently push disclosure past the public hearings on the very tax it’s requesting. Two open records appeals are still pending with the Kentucky Attorney General. VisitLex has claimed that no contracts exist for a $60,000-a-year lobbying retainer it is actively paying, that no internal communications exist about the seven registered lobbyists on its payroll, and that the public doesn’t need to see the names of the employees it compensates with tax dollars. This is not the behavior of an agency that believes it can withstand scrutiny. It is the behavior of one that knows it cannot. And the records we do have tell the story plainly enough. VisitLex’s president earned $340,536 last year — more than double the mayor’s salary — including a $58,000 bonus drawn from hotel tax revenue. Eight employees split $155,816 in bonuses despite reporting a year earlier that such payments may violate the Kentucky Constitution. Between 2022 and 2024, employees charged $427,000 to agency credit cards, much of it at restaurants and bars. The bureau employs seven lobbyists through a government affairs firm. Its total payroll is $2.4 million. Its budget is $16 million. And now it wants $2.1 million more. For what? VisitLex’s stated mission is to attract tourists and conventions. But we should be honest about what the tourism economy actually produces in a city like Lexington. It produces hotel housekeepers earning $12 an hour. It produces restaurant workers without health insurance. It produces traffic on roads that were never built for tour buses. It produces short-term rentals that pull homes off the market and drive up rents in a city already in the grip of an affordability crisis. The Airbnb tax that funds VisitLex is itself a monument to this contradiction: a levy on the very industry that is pricing Lexingtonians out of their own neighborhoods, redirected not to housing or infrastructure but to an agency whose executives earn six-figure bonuses to attract more Airbnbs. The quiet part out loud: A slide from the Civitas presentation pitching VisitLex’s new Tourism Improvement District features Jack Johnson, Chief Advocacy Officer of Destinations International, warning that communities who don’t compete for “the world’s tourists, consumers and available talent” will be “left behind.” It is the language of inevitability — designed not to persuade but to foreclose debate. None of this is accidental. The tourism-industrial playbook is the same in every mid-sized American city because it was written by the same people. Consulting firms like Civitas — the one pitching this new district — move from city to city selling identical proposals with identical slide decks, promising economic development that somehow always materializes as marketing contracts, luxury travel for staff, and a permanent class of well-compensated administrators presiding over an industry of low-wage labor. The pattern is not unique to Lexington. It is a template, refined over decades, for converting public revenue into private benefit under the banner of economic growth. The consultants get paid. The executives get bonuses. The hotel chains get subsidized marketing. And the workers who make the beds and pour the drinks get nothing. I would feel differently if the $2.1 million were going to affordable housing, or transit, or any of the things that would actually improve quality of life in this city. But it isn’t. It’s going to the same bureau that can’t produce its own credit card statements on time, that redacts employee names from public salary records, and that pays its president more than the governor. The Council should not approve a new taxing district for an agency that treats public money as a private entitlement and public accountability as an inconvenience. Not until every dollar is accounted for. Not until every record is produced. Not while the people who stand to benefit the most are the ones holding the pen. Paul Oliva is the editor of the Lexington Times. The post Lexington doesn’t need another tourism tax. It needs answers | COMMENTARY appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less