By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
The best kind of tax is one paid by someone else. Great Bend’s transient guest tax is just that. Every visitor who stays in a Great Bend hotel pays a six percent tax. Five percent of that tax funds the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and one percent funds the Events Center. CVB Director Amanda Gaddis provided some collection numbers to the Great Bend City Council during Tuesday’s meeting.
“The first quarter was September through November, and we collected $118,042.38,” she said. “That’s the second-highest since 2012. When you compare all the averages, that’s about a 27 percent increase in what we’ve seen in that quarter, so we’re pretty proud of those numbers.”
Gaddis said various conferences and meetings were held in town during that quarter, but another big driver of the increase was out-of-town hunters.
“I talked to Curtis Wolf out at the Kansas Wetlands Education Center, and he said they did have a lot of the hunting numbers come back,” Gaddis said. “The birds, not so much, but because we did have water out there, we are seeing those numbers come back.”
Members of the CVB and KWEC will attend the 78th Annual Omaha International Boat Sports and Travel Show this weekend in Nebraska. In past years, the Great Bend booth has drawn in an average of about 2,200 visitors. Each of those contacts is an opportunity to invite that person to visit Great Bend.