Cape to see $450,000 savings as bonds end

The city of Cape Girardeau could stockpile $450,000 in motel and restaurant tax money over a seven-month period for tourism and economic development projects after it pays off bonds this spring that have financed improvements in Shawnee and Osage parks.

A soon-to-be-formed committee of the Cape Girardeau Convention and Visitors Bureau plans to propose ways to spend the money. The plan will be presented to the city council this spring, CVB officials said.

Chuck Martin, director of the CVB, said the plan will propose spending money on projects that could draw tourists. Martin said the painting of murals on the city's floodwall is an example of a past project designed to draw visitors to the city.

Martin said it would ultimately be up to the city council to decide how to spend the money.

City officials said the money can't be spent for basic city services.

City finance director John Richbourg said the city will pay $645,000 this year to retire $5.1 million in bonds issued to fund construction of the Shawnee Park soccer fields complex and the Osage Community Centre. The city issued $3.8 million in bonds in 1993 and $1.3 million in bonds in 1997.

All of the bonds will be paid off in April, Richbourg said Friday. The city then will be able to set aside motel and restaurant tax money that's not earmarked for the Southeast Missouri State University River Campus arts school project or the Cape Girardeau Convention and Visitors Bureau.

In November, the city will start earmarking all of the motel and restaurant tax money -- not budgeted for general CVB operations -- to make bond payments for the city's $8.9 million share of the project to turn a former Catholic seminary into an arts campus.

The CVB currently operates on a $440,000 budget paid with motel and restaurant tax dollars.

But revenue stockpiled between April and November from the 1 percent restaurant tax and 4 percent motel tax could be put to other tourism and economic development uses that have yet to be proposed or budgeted, Richbourg said.

The money can't be used for general city operations. The uses of the tax money were clearly spelled out in the measure approved by voters in 1983.

Meanwhile, the city already is out from under another debt. It finished paying off the last of $5 million in bonds for the Show Me Center at the end of last year, eliminating a 10-cent property tax that had been used to help retire the bonds.

Motel and restaurant tax money initially was used, along with the property tax, to help pay off the bonds issued in 1984, Richbourg said. But in recent years, the property tax generated the $435,000 needed annually to make the bond payments, he said.

The city no longer has that expense, but it also doesn't have the revenue because the property tax expired when the city finished paying off the bonds, Richbourg said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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