TID comment

 

Fred Allebach

8/20/24

Public comment for 8/21/22 city council meeting, Tourism Improvement District (TID) renewal item

As the renewal of the TID comes up as a consent calendar item, I submit that while Sonoma has a Sustainable Tourism web page, https://www.sonomacity.org/sustainable-toursim/, Sonoma tourism is fundamentally unsustainable because not one word is mentioned on this page or otherwise at the TID about equity for the people who work to uphold the whole industry. The city Sustainable Tourism page amounts to superficial greenwashing that leaves actually sustainable, triple bottom line, full cost accounting out.

Actually sustainability, with triple bottom line and full cost accounting is a real, going policy frame, not a vague generality. The world is going to the dogs rapidly because of failure to adopt actually sustainable UN policies known since the 1980s and before.

If the city General Plan says that people who work here should be able to live here as a top aspiration, where are the efforts by the city to see that this may actually happen?  

I worked hard on a proposal (sent to you all earlier) to leverage the TID to bring more socio-econ benefits to workers. Upon meeting with City Manager Guhin, I was told that leveraging the TID for anything other than benefiting hotel management and tourism boosting was really not possible, and that my proposal was too general and did not have specific data to show that hotel, tourism, and hospitality workers were getting a bad deal locally. See attached SoCo wages sheet provided to me by Unite Here!

I sent David hard data on the tourism sector's low wages and my objective Census data studies from the 2022 American Community Survey update showing DACs and DUCs right here in the city and the valley. Same people on the wages sheet who are hotel workers. 

How can the city endeavor to make local tourism actually sustainable by making sure that hotel and tourism-hospitality workers can make a living wage? How are we going to address unsustainable aspects of our local economy? Does the whole system ride on a Faustian Bargain that requires exploiting low wage labor to fund the city with TOT while hotel management, many which are large corporations, makes money hand over fist in a billion dollar+ SoCo economy?

Hotels are the total boogeyman of local development projects and here the city is throwing them a bone? 

I just find the whole gestalt really disappointing. I would hope that the council would see more than a fiduciary responsibility to bring bodies to shop here to fund city coffers when the whole arrangement has deep equity flaws that end up being overlooked as not pragmatic. If the wine-tourism-hospitality combine is the horse that pulls the cart of the local economy, why can't this cart pull along some freight to support the workers on whose backs the whole system rides?

Aside from the TID, I hope the council and staff will look at actual sustainability as a valid policy frame and try to make that work so that equity here doesn't seem to always come in last place.