The tax would have raised about $2.4 million (a number I figured out here) by adding 3 percent to the cost of tickets and passes and 5 percent to the parking fee.
That's not much per ticket - it would have worked out to about a buck extra per ticket I bought last year, plus an extra 50 cents or so on the parking. And the councilman who proposed the tax increase said it would have gone toward improving roads the highway interchange and access road to the park. But Kings Island launched a PR blitz against the tax, e-mailing passholders to turn out in opposition.
Looks like it worked.
Tweet
There's nothing wrong with I71 at either exit to Kings Island, nor is there anything wrong with the interchanges or Kings Island Drive. If there were, I would attribute it just as much to the snarled 5pm Cincinnati rush hour 12 months of the year as I do the 4 months of Kings Island traffic. The council representative can say that to justify the tax, but if there's nothing wrong with the roads, much would have gone somewhere else.
I don't live in Cincinnati, so I don't have a dog in this fight. In general, I don't think that the amounts discussed were that burdensome, but at the same time I think that local governments should build broad, diverse tax bases, rather than hitting any single source too hard.
What got me in the news story about the vote were the people who laughed at the claim from the council member that he was a conservative.
Pet peeve time: I consider myself very conservative financially. And I consider it a conservative value to pay up front for what you need. I don't see it as very conservative to borrow the money, or to wait for someone else to pick up the tab. Nor do I consider it conservative to defer maintenance to the point where something falls apart and you have to pay for an even more expensive rebuild.
Kicking the can down the road to future generations isn't conservative. It's selfish.
Now maybe these numbers worked, maybe they didn't. But saying a guy's not conservative just because he supported raising taxes to pay for something he considered a community need is just wrong, in my book. This just drives me nuts about the teabaggers and Club for Growth wackos who have hijacked the conservative name on financial issues.
/pet-peeve
I am glad that the tax was voted against, and shame on Mason for trying to get even more money from Kings Island which they do not deserve!
Thank you for your proper definition of being financially conservative. I don't know where the term went (honestly, those damn teabaggers think Obama's a socialist - he's made incredible cuts in the latter half of his presidency, thus far). They give conservatives a bad name.
This article has been archived and is no longer accepting comments.
Then again, the councilman never let us see where this $3M figure came from, or how it would be divided, so chances are some of it would be poured into the community's other ventures (as Robert pointed out previously).
Pretty amazing the way theme parks seem to share a bond with many of their customers. You don't see other entertainment businesses, say Apple, branching out for support from their customers, asking them to vote against a ban on laptop computers in college lecture halls at some university, for example.