CITY SAYS RESTAURANT TAX COULD RAISE MORE

A city official estimates the city could take in an additional $45,000 a year from its hotel and restaurant taxes if the law was revised to include every business that serves meals.

But most of those who want the tax extended to include convenience stores, snack bars, employee cafeterias, stores that sell prepared food, stores that sell prepared deserts, and bed-and-breakfast establishments say they are concerned more with equity than increasing revenue.

John Richbourg, the city finance director, made the estimate based on sales-tax receipts. He said the restaurant tax pulled in $559,400 last year. Added to $313,000 from the hotel tax, interest from investments and grants, the fund had a total income of $921,000 last year and expenditures of $778,000.

The fund has a balance of $463,000, with $250,000 earmarked for a new building for the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Under a city ordinance passed by voters in 1984, the 1 percent tax on restaurant receipts and the 3 percent hotel-motel tax goes into a special fund that pays off bonds on the Show Me Center, Osage Community Centre and Shawnee Park Sports Complex, the expenses of the city's Convention and Visitors Bureau, and promoting economic development.

The tax expires in October 2004, at the same time bonds for the Show Me Center are scheduled to be paid off.

The city code defines a restaurant as "any inn or establishment engaged solely or chiefly in the sale and serving of meals or lunches, where tables and chairs are provided for the customers."

That means shoppers buying bread at a Bi-State Southern convenience store don't pay the restaurant tax while shoppers buying bread at the St. Louis Bread Company do, and someone buying a meal-to-go at Sonic Drive-In doesn't pay the restaurant tax while someone buying a meal-to-go at Port Cape Girardeau pays the tax. It even means that someone eating a meal at Rhodes 101 Stop or the snack bar at Target doesn't pay the restaurant tax.

The difference is that St. Louis Bread Company and Port Cape Girardeau are engaged chiefly in serving meals to patrons seated in their establishments, while Target, Rhodes, Sonic and Bi-State do most of their business selling other products in other ways.

Since the beginning of the year, the Cape Girardeau Convention and Visitors Bureau Advisory Board, a committee of members of that board and the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, and the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce have all gone on record asking the City Council to review the tax.

Convention and Visitors Bureau director Mary Miller and Chamber of Commerce president John Mehner said the issue is equity more than needed revenue.

Mehner said circumstances have changed since 1984. "C-stores, generally speaking, did not have sit-down restaurants within them," he said.

Dan Drury, a member of the Convention and Visitors Bureau Advisory Board who was on the committee with park board members, said the bureau could use the additional money. Referring to the old St. Vincent's Seminary near the Mississippi River, he said, "If you take all the years we've had the tax, they could have had the money to purchase that already."