CAYCE — Two regional tourism organizations that had their funding stripped from the city are firing back at a longtime councilman who expressed concerns about their record-keeping process.
“We follow the law,” said Miriam Atria, president of Capital City/Lake Murray Country. “It’s been very upsetting, as someone who’s been doing this for 40 years, and doing it right.”
On June 3, City Council voted to give $44,175 in tax accommodations money to the Greater Cayce West Columbia Chamber of Commerce. Last year, council split the money evenly among the chamber, Lake Murray Country and Experience Columbia.
Then, at a June 18 council meeting, Councilman Phil Carter accused Lake Murray Country and Experience Columbia of not submitting budgets in previous years for council to review.
The District Four councilmember said he went back through council meeting agendas dating back to 2015, and found that no organization had submitted budgets before receiving the accommodations tax funding — or expenditure reviews afterward.
“Should we hold these people to come back and let us know what they did with the money? Absolutely. Did we ask them to? I don’t know. We may have, we may not have,” Carter said.
At the center of this controversy is a concern over how the chamber plans to spend this money. In their initial application, the chamber did not submit a budget, nor a formal application detailing when and where they'd spend the advertisement money.
At the June 18 meeting, Mayor Elise Partin asked for more information from the chamber regarding how they spent previous expenses, and a more detailed look at how they plan to spend their money in the upcoming fiscal year.
There was no representative from the Chamber present to explain the document they had submitted, which included dollar amounts equal to more than four times the amount of funding the city had awarded them.
Officials from the Greater Cayce West Columbia Chamber could not be reached for comment.
Because Carter couldn't find the records of expenditure reviews submitted previously, he claimed the city had to “clean up” their process going forward. But when asked if that applied to the current vote on the chamber’s budget, Carter said he wasn’t going to hold the chamber to something when “I haven’t asked anyone to do it for at least 10 years.”
According to reports from the South Carolina Tourism Expenditure Review Committee, as well as emails shared with The Post and Courier from Lake Murray Country and Experience Columbia, the city has been receiving budgets and expenditure reviews from all of the tourism organizations through at least 2023.
Like Lake Murray Country, Experience Columbia was similarly confused by Carter’s comments.
“Experience Columbia SC always provides all reports required and requested by our funding entities, including the City of Cayce,” President Bill Ellen wrote in an email to The Post and Courier.
Carter could not be reached for comment, but Cayce spokesperson Ashley Hunter later clarified to The Post and Courier that Carter specifically meant council had never asked applicants to present their budgets to them after they had allocated the money.
How the accommodations tax process works
Among council and the general public, there seems to be confusion about where this funding comes from and how it's allocated.
The Accommodations Tax is collected from a fee tacked onto lodging bills, like hotels and motels, in the Cayce area. It’s sometimes referred to as a “heads on beds” tax.
Thirty percent of that balance goes toward a “special fund.” Money from this fund can only be used for advertising and the promotion of tourism. The law gives local municipalities the authority to direct these funds toward one or more organizations to manage those promotional efforts.
The process works like this:
Organizations must submit their applications, including their planned budgets, to the Citizen's Accommodations Tax Committee. The committee, made up of local hospitality-industry professionals, makes recommendations to the Council on how they should divide the funding.
Who gets the funding, and how much they get, is ultimately left up to a vote by Council. Though, the full application for funding is never submitted to council — unless they specifically request to see those applications, they'll only see the recommendations.
This isn’t the first time Cayce has been confused about the accommodations tax process.
A letter from the city’s municipal clerk to the Tourism Expenditure Review Committee in 2017 reveals that the full amount of funding that was supposed to be awarded was, in fact, never doled out.
The letter names the reason for this as not being able to keep the administrative coordinator position filled for “several years.” The administrative coordinator serves as the go-between for staff and the citizens advisory accommodations tax committee, and is in charge of submitting the reporting forms to the oversight committee.
Cayce has been under fire for turnover in several high-level positions in recent years, most recently hiring their third city manager in a year. Combined with in-fighting among council members, it's sparked concerns that the loss of institutional knowledge has led to confusion and loss of oversight in the small town.