By as soon as Jan. 15, visitors will start paying a little more for short-term rentals in Lowndes County.
During its regular meeting Monday at the courthouse, the board of supervisors approved a resolution requiring the collection of a local 2% hotel/motel tax on all short-term rentals, including properties booked through services like Airbnb and VRBO.
Visitors would be charged the tax when booking the short-term rentals.
That resolution closely resembles one the Columbus City Council approved in October. The city also approved an ordinance requiring owners of short-term rentals to register those properties with the building department and follow certain regulations.
“In the city, we had a number of complaints of residents offering their houses for short-term rentals because sometimes you get a group of 50 people having a party, charging admission, cars parked all over, noise and all that,” City Attorney Jeff Turnage told county supervisors when presenting at their Monday meeting.
Turnage said the legislature approved the 2% local and private tax on hotel/motel rentals in Lowndes County in 1985. It wasn’t until this year’s session, though, where a new code provision clearly made all short-term rentals eligible for state and local lodging taxes.
The local and private bill for Lowndes County requires revenue from those collections to be used toward the promotion of conventions, Turnage said. While the city uses its share to maintain Trotter Convention Center downtown, and the county funnels its part to the Columbus-Lowndes Convention and Visitors Bureau, Turnage believes “convention” is open to wider interpretation.
“Convention is pretty broadly described in the dictionary as a gathering of people with a common purpose,” Turnage said. “So I don’t know why you couldn’t use it for your baseball fields or your soccer complex.”
Turnage said to collect the tax, the county need only pass a resolution to send to the Mississippi Department of Revenue, and it would become effective 30 days later. Supervisors could always add an ordinance later to give the measure guidelines and enforcement teeth.
If supervisors chose to do nothing, Turnage said the city could move forward collecting the tax inside the city limits.
“I thought it would make better sense … to send the county’s and city’s resolutions down there together,” Turnage said.
District 5 Supervisor Leroy Brooks moved to approve the resolution, then after 30 days to discuss approving an ordinance, which passed unanimously.
County Administrator Jay Fisher said he had a copy of the city’s ordinance that supervisors can use a model.
“The ordinance is really good … but we’re going to do county specific things,” Fisher said. “Who’s going to issue the permits? All those kinds of things still need to be fleshed out, but I think it could be fleshed out pretty simply.”
Turnage told The Dispatch after the meeting that the city council will discuss a shorter, cleaner version of its resolution at its meeting today before sending it to MDOR.
Other business
In other business Monday, county supervisors:
■ opted out of the state Safe Solicitation Act, which would have required panhandlers to obtain permits and follow strict guidelines; and
■ reappointed Rick McGill to the Regional Landfill Board.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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