MENDOCINO CO., 5/13/26 — Cannabis has collapsed from its boom years, and wine is contracting. Coastal tourism is one of Mendocino County’s few industries still pulling crowds — but the county doesn’t support its primary tourism marketing platform, Visit Mendocino County, at least not with the funds it used to provide.
Who does? The hoteliers themselves, through a 1% surcharge they vote on every year. They are now within a handful of signatures of agreeing to double that surcharge to 2%.The man brought back to close the signature gap is the same one who set up the original surcharge 19 years ago. He’s keeping his day job running a Fort Bragg hotel while he does it.
Scott Schneider founded the Mendocino County Tourism Commission — which does business as Visit Mendocino County, or VMC for short — in 2006 and ran it through 2016. He returned this spring as interim executive director. The appointment surfaced quietly on a marketing-committee agenda in early April, and it was never publicly announced. He remains general manager of the Noyo Harbor Inn in Fort Bragg, the job he took when he left VMC.
“I’ve been asked to help out for a while with VMC, and I still care about the organization greatly,” Schneider said in a May 6 interview. “So I wanted to help out.”
A double mission
The job has two pieces. The first is finishing a petition drive among Mendocino’s hotel and inn owners. The marketing surcharge isn’t a tax — it’s a self-assessment, voted in by the people who pay it, and renewed by them every year. The petition in front of them would switch VMC’s funding from one California business-improvement statute, written in 1989, to a more flexible 1994 version of the same idea — and in Mendocino’s case, raise the surcharge from 1% to 2%.
It’s a money-talks vote. Big hotels count more than small inns because they pay more. Schneider says he’s about five points shy of the half he needs. Cross that line, and 2% assessment is more or less a done deal.
The second piece of the job is harder, and it is the one most Mendocino readers should care about: figuring out why the marketing arm of an industry pulling in roughly $520 million a year in direct visitor spending, by Visit California’s latest count, is pleading with its own dues payers, drawing down its reserves and operating without a permanent leader.
What the county does with tourism money
The county levies a tax on hotel and short-term-rental stays in Mendocino, 10% of the room rate, charged to the guest at checkout, called the Transient Occupancy Tax. The hotel collects it and hands it to the county; the county puts it in the general fund — the pot that pays for sheriff’s deputies, public health, road repair and the rest.
In fiscal year 2023-24, the most recent year with public numbers, the tax brought in roughly $8.15 million. None of it is returned to VMC as a dedicated tourism-marketing match.
That used to be different. From 2006 through mid-2022, the county matched VMC’s surcharge revenue at 50 cents on the dollar — about $663,000 in fiscal 2021-22 alone, drawn from the general fund. In June 2022, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors replaced the match with a flat $150,000. Then in 2023, the board zeroed that out too.
The county’s structural deficit — the built-in gap between what it spends and what it brings in every year — reached $17.8 million in the current budget by the state auditor’s count. Supervisors leaned on that gap to justify the cut.
The result: a tourism agency funded entirely by its own industry’s self-assessment, asking that industry to double the bill, while the county collects about ten times that amount in lodging tax from the same guests and reinvests none of it in dedicated tourism marketing. VMC’s savings dropped from $2.23 million in fiscal 2022 to $1.23 million in fiscal 2024 — a 45% drawdown in two years — even as the agency is budgeting nearly 30% above what its surcharge actually collects this year.
The coast pays for the marketing
The case Schneider is selling to holdouts is structural. About two-thirds of the surcharge comes from the coast — Fort Bragg, the town of Mendocino, Little River, Elk and Point Arena — according to internal VMC figures Schneider cited but the county has never published.
“We’re actually able to be more responsive to both regions by not doing the same thing for everybody,” he said. “The idea is that we would take two-thirds of the marketing dollars and really push that towards the visitors that visit the coast. Leisure travel. The other third of the marketing dollars, do what works for inland and 101. Work with Visit Ukiah, the Willits-Ukiah Lodging Conference, and ask: how do you want us to help you market to your visitors?”
For most of VMC’s life, with the county match attached, that money was spent broadly across the whole county. “All for one, one for all,” in Schneider’s phrasing. Without the match, the math has changed.
The petition holdouts, he said, are mostly large Fort Bragg properties that want that kind of split nailed down before they sign on. “Properties that have not signed on to 2%, really, that’s what they want to see. They want to see the percentage of dollars that the coast brings in, they want to see it reinvested specifically to those potential guests.”
But that’s a number nobody can give
The holdouts are asking a reasonable question: prove the marketing works. Show us what we get back for the surcharge dollar.
The honest answer is that no tourism agency in the country can produce that number cleanly, and Mendocino is no exception.
The reason is the booking pipeline. Every hotel runs its own reservation software. The big chains pour their bookings into proprietary platforms — Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt — and treat the source data as a competitive secret.
The online travel sites — Expedia, Booking.com, Airbnb — take 15 to 25 percent off the top and keep the attribution data, because their whole pitch to hotels is, we’ll bring you bookings so long as you keep paying us.
A tourism agency can run a Google ad, watch the click-throughs, see hotel occupancy tick up the same month — and still not know whether the ad caused the booking or whether the visitor would have shown up anyway.
What VMC can do is buy industry data. Two firms — CoStar and STR Inc., the latter a hotel-research outfit whose initials stand for Smith Travel Research, not short-term rental —sell county-level occupancy and rate data behind a paywall. Visit California’s public dashboards lump Mendocino into a broader North Coast region. Neither tells the agency which Google ad sold which room.
What Mendocino does have is a county-contracted vendor, Granicus, currently handling short-term-rental enforcement under a $95,721 three-year contract that ends in September 2026. Schneider wants that contract’s renewal used as an opening to expand the company’s scope — surcharge collection, online tax remittance for hotels, better county-level numbers.
“Imagine people being able to actually pay online and submit data online,” he said. “I think the county, hopefully sometime later this year, will look into expanding that contract.”
That gets closer to defensible numbers. It does not close the gap between marketing spend and bookings. No tourism contract does, anywhere. The fight over the surcharge is, at bottom, a fight over a marketing investment that the industry has never been able to fully audit — and that is true in San Diego and Asheville, not just Mendocino.
What happens next
Schneider’s tenure is explicitly interim. “There will be a search for a permanent full-time person over the summer,” he said. “Once the renewal happens at 1%, we will see if people really want to bump it to 2%. And if so, we’ll get the signatures and get it done. If not, then we won’t.”
The annual 1% surcharge renewal is in front of hotel and inn owners now. The 2% conversion petition is a parallel process, not part of it. Both depend on the same owners, the same weighted vote — where bigger hotels count for more — and the same coast-versus-inland conversation that Schneider, between Fort Bragg shifts, has come back to mediate.
Disclosure: Scott Schneider and reporter Roger Coryell are longtime professional colleagues in Northern California tourism marketing. Schneider was interviewed by phone on May 6, 2026.
The same problem as every other tax, it is sold as a beneficial need, then confiscated to the general fund and spent on whatever the geniuses in charge deem appropriate. As a payer of too much property tax I would like to see more cuts and less taxes.