A little bit of good news in the holidays…
County sees large jump in hotel occupancy taxes
— reported by the Houston Business Journal
Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt said Friday that his office had collected and distributed more than $8.1 million in hotel-occupancy taxes during the third quarter of 2005, an increase of nearly $575,000 over the same period last year.
“Even with our hotels filled for weeks with evacuees from hurricanes Katrina and Rita — most of whom were exempt from hotel taxes — we still saw one of our best quarters in four years,” Bettencourt said. “Just as some of us predicted, the taxes waived for the evacuees produced no losses. That was tax money we never would have collected anyway.”
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