In January, La Plata County officials will review initial findings of a hired consultant’s ongoing audit of county vacation rental units.
Dolores-based MUNIRevs is conducting an inventory of nontraditional lodging units outside city limits to ensure the county is receiving all due lodgers and sales tax revenue. Work began in June.
Unlike the city of Durango, the county historically has not tracked vacation rental owners, who rent their rooms through sites such as Vacation Rental by Owner (VRBO) and Airbnb, and pay sales and lodgers tax to the state. Those revenues are redistributed to counties.
Lodgers tax revenue is used primarily for tourism marketing efforts.
MUNIRevs, which has conducted similar analyses for Telluride and Mountain Village, completed a quarterly audit and identified about 50 new vacation rental units that registered in the county during that time frame.
MUNIRevs owner Erin Neer said the company identified 644 units within La Plata County or close to county lines registered on VRBO. About 200, or just fewer than 30 percent of those listings will be the focus of the audit moving forward, as they are not managed and are outside municipal limits.
“We’ve already done initial outreach for those property owners including emails and phone calls,” Neer said. “We’ll continue to do that, and encourage those people to put their state sales tax number on their advertisements, so we automatically know they’re in compliance.”
By next month, county officials expect to know how those numbers translate to additional tax revenue.
“One of the biggest points of this was to make sure folks understand their lodgers tax requirements and see how that manifests into additional lodgers tax that comes into the county,” county spokeswoman Megan Graham said. “It takes awhile for that information to come into our books.”
The analysis cost about $17,750, plus 30 percent of new revenue generated in the first quarter of the yearlong audit.
As MUNIRevs continues the study, the county assessor’s office also is evaluating some properties to determine if the owners have personal property subject to taxation.
According to most recent county financial reports, the county has collected $262,001 in lodgers tax in the first three quarters of 2016, and will likely exceed the $274,019 generated last year.
“Everyone has different tax rates, but when we did our studies in Telluride and Mountain Village, we figured out the average revenue remitted per property over there is between $1,500 and $2,000 a year,” Neer said. “Multiply that by 100 properties, and that adds up.”
jpace@durangoherald.com
