Visit Mendocino County’s contract has lapsed—and someone else wants in

MENDOCINO CO., 7/9/26 — Book a $200 night in Mendocino County outside city limits and two extra lines show up on the bill. One is a $20 room tax. The other is a $2 assessment. They look alike. They aren’t — and the smaller line is the one the county is arguing about.

The $20 is the transient occupancy tax, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a tax. The county has charged it on hotel stays under 30 days since 1965, and the rate today is 10 percent. The money lands in the county general fund, where the Board of Supervisors can spend it on anything — sheriff’s deputies, roads, mental health.

In fiscal year 2023-24, the last year with a published total, lodging in the unincorporated county paid about $8.1 million, according to the treasurer-tax collector’s report. The four cities — Ukiah, Fort Bragg, Willits and Point Arena — charge their own room taxes and keep every dime.

The other line, the $2, is not a tax, even though it rides on the same bill. It’s the Business Improvement District assessment, and it exists because in 2006 the county’s lodging owners asked to charge themselves 1 percent so somebody would market Mendocino County to travelers. The county collects it, keeps a handling fee of about $36,000 a year and passes the rest to Visit Mendocino County, the nonprofit tourism organization. Unlike the tax, the assessment can only be spent one way: promoting the businesses that pay it. This year the pot is budgeted at $1.2 million.

Nobody is fighting over the $8.1 million tax. The fight is over the $1.2 million assessment — who spends it, and for what. And as of last week, the contract that lets anyone spend it has expired.

Why a county with real problems cares about a marketing budget

Travelers spent $532 million in Mendocino County in 2025 — more than before the pandemic, though the number has barely moved since 2022 — and that spending supported about 5,800 jobs and sent $51.1 million to state and local governments, according to the California travel impacts report Dean Runyan Associates prepared for the statewide group Visit California this spring.

That’s the logic of the 1 percent: a small assessment on room rents pays for the marketing that fills the rooms, and full rooms generate the 10 percent tax that helps pay for everything else. The industry funds the seed. The county harvests the crop.

The county used to help fund the seed too. The 2006 deal that created the business improvement district had the county matching 50 cents on the assessment dollar. The match shrank over the years to a flat $150,000, then stopped altogether in 2024.

The county’s finances were the subject of a critical state audit last winter, and every department is scrapping for general-fund dollars. The county still collects its handling fee, though. Lodging owners asked the supervisors in May to waive it; the supervisors instead made sure the tourism district budget pays it to the county. The marketing pot is entirely the industry’s own money, funneled into a marketing effort.

A contract gap, an inland ask and a stalled petition

Three things are happening to that $1.2 million at once.

First, the paperwork. The supervisors voted 5-0 on June 23 to levy the assessment for the new fiscal year — Resolution 26-113, no protests filed. Seven days later, the one-year agreement that lets Visit Mendocino County spend the money expired on schedule, and nothing has replaced it yet.

That sounds more dramatic than it is.

“In the 20 years of the BID, the county has never finalized the contract before July 1,” Scott Schneider, Visit Mendocino County’s interim executive director and general manager of Fort Bragg’s Noyo Harbor Inn, told the Voice by email.

Collections and payments continue while the paperwork catches up, he said. A replacement contract is drafted and headed for the supervisors’ July 21 agenda, according to a letter the tourism commission and the district’s advisory board sent to county counsel in late June.

Second, the inland ask. A new group calling itself the Inland Mendocino Tourism Council surfaced June 23 in the supervisors’ meeting packet with a proposal: send 25 percent of the assessment — about $300,000 a year — to a fund for promoting inland towns, from Hopland to Covelo, with the Greater Ukiah Business and Tourism Alliance holding the checkbook as fiscal agent.

Third, the doubling. Visit Mendocino County has spent two years gathering signatures to raise the assessment from hotel owners 1 percent to 2 percent, which would garner roughly $2.3 million a year to market the county. The petition needs owners representing just over half the assessment dollars, and it stood at 44.87 percent in the annual report the supervisors approved June 23.

The supervisors assigned the inland question to an ad hoc committee — Supervisors John Haschak and Madeline Cline — to figure out how those communities get a fair shake.

The inland case: “What feels like scraps”

Katrina Kessen runs the Greater Ukiah Business and Tourism Alliance and signed the inland proposal. Her word for the whole effort is “bridge.”

“This is not an attempt to disregard Visit Mendocino and their mission,” she told the Voice. “This is more designed to actually help Visit Mendocino County with something that they have said that they would like help with.”

She has been talking with Schneider about the idea since March, she said: “This was not a surprise move.” And she calls it an experiment: “This really is a pilot project and proposal… If it’s not 25 percent, then what is it? What would it look like?”

Her argument is the one inland businesses have made for years. The coast generates most of the assessment — “whether it’s 70 percent, 75 percent, whatever the split is,” as she put it — and the coast gets the attention. “That leaves us here inland with what feels like scraps… not enough momentum, not enough focus, not enough financial investment to really get a lift.”

Part of the problem, she says, is the name itself: “It is very difficult to pitch a PR piece to someone and sell something called the inland corridor.” The inland story — the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, a wine industry she describes as going through “severe constriction,” the backcountry outdoors — needs its own tellers, she argues. “We’re asking for the ability to craft and tell the story as inland people know how to tell it.”

The money, she insists, would not disappear into salaries: “The point of this initiative is not to get money for overhead expenses.” The plan would start with community sessions on brand identity, then build around anchor events and outdoor recreation.

Results would be measured “with the same metrics and accountability that anyone else in our industry has at their disposal” — social media benchmarks, spending data, location analytics. “Let us do the heavy lift,” she said of Visit Mendocino County, “and you can still look like the superhero at the end of the day.”

The inland council is “a committee of stakeholders” — lodging owners, wineries and economic development professionals, she says. The alliance is the only formal organization among them, and the Ukiah Chamber of Commerce is what she calls its “fiduciary arm.” The proposal itself names partner organizations but does not include the lodging operators, the businesses that actually pay the assessment. Kessen is also no outsider: she sat on Visit Mendocino County’s board of directors and held the advisory board’s inland at-large seat until her term expired in January 2025.

The numbers everyone argued about, and what they actually say

For years, every side, without quoting a source, has cited a coast-versus-inland split. Visit Mendocino County’s marketing plan says roughly 80 percent of collections come from the coast and Anderson Valley. The annual report says about 75 percent come from the north coast. The inland proposal says inland generates about 30 percent. None of them footnoted anything, because the treasurer-tax collector’s office publishes only countywide totals.

The Voice has now obtained the actual breakdown — assessment collections by ZIP code for the past two fiscal years, compiled by the treasurer-tax collector’s office and provided by Schneider. It says: coastal lodging paid 82.6 percent of the $1.13 million collected in fiscal year 2024-25. Inland lodging — Ukiah, Willits, Hopland, Laytonville and the rest — paid 17.4 percent, about $197,000. The year before, inland’s share was 21.3 percent.

The inland communities asking for 25 percent of the pot paid in about 17 percent last year. At current collections, the ask runs roughly $86,000 a year more than inland lodging puts in.

Haschak, one of the two ad hoc supervisors in the committee, has already done that math. “They’re asking for 25, which, I guess, if it turns out 17.4 is the consistent number, then we’d have to reassess that. Right?” he said. He also vouched for the inland effort’s sincerity — Willits-area people he’s talked to “certainly are supportive of doing something different.”

And he described where the committee is headed: meetings with Visit Mendocino County and inland stakeholders, a session with county counsel on the legal mechanics, and a possible “pilot program,” maybe structured as a subcontract. “We’re just looking at the options,” he said.

The data isn’t tidy, and nobody claims it is. Ukiah’s collections fell by a third in one year, from about $143,000 to $96,000, and nobody knows why. “I only wish we had data to determine the reason for the change,” Schneider said.

Kessen has asked the city of Ukiah — which handles its own reporting — for numbers and is still waiting: “It’s just conjecture at this point as to why it’s down.” Even the map is soft: the tax collector’s breakdown counts Anderson Valley as inland; Visit Mendocino County counts it as coast. Two annual reports give different collection totals for the same year, about $565,000 apart, with no published explanation — a bookkeeping question the new treasurer-tax collector inherited rather than created.

There’s no industry fallback, either. Most Mendocino lodging doesn’t report to STR, the service that tracks hotel occupancy and room rates, the way lodging in competing regions does. Visit Mendocino County proposes to fix this with a panel of lodging partners willing to share their numbers.

Visit Mendocino County’s answer: right idea, wrong instrument

Visit Mendocino County’s response to the inland carve-out isn’t “no.” It’s “not like this.”

In a letter to county counsel — signed by advisory board chair Cally Dym of the Little River Inn and Visit Mendocino County board chair Kasie Gray, and copied to the two ad hoc supervisors — the organization argues that the annual report the supervisors approved June 23 is, legally, the budget.

State law — Section 36542 of the 1989 improvement-district statute — sets out one process for changing an approved report: published notice, a public hearing and a vote by the supervisors. Writing a 25 percent carve-out into the administration contract instead would amount to amending the budget without the hearing. “Our concern is not the policy objective, but rather the legal mechanism by which that objective is accomplished,” Dym and Gray wrote. Their path: sign this year’s contract as drafted, and run any dedicated inland share through next year’s annual report, hearing and all.

Kessen reads the law differently. The approved report already says the district wants to invest inland, she argues, so an inland allocation “is within the scope of those recommendations.” County counsel hasn’t weighed in publicly.

Dym filled in the history in an email to the Voice on Tuesday, and her account starts where the county’s money stopped. When the county revoked its match in 2024, she wrote, the tourism commission’s first move was a bigger district modeled on North Lake Tahoe, one that would fold in the restaurants and attractions it was already promoting. “The County politicians nipped that idea in the bud because it also taxes locals,” she wrote. The commission then asked the county’s two main wine organizations to partner on the district. “They declined.”

With its savings gone, the commission is down to what the 1 percent actually brings in — roughly $1.2 million — and has cut “peripheral funding,” she wrote, to focus on “what puts heads in beds.” The growing pains, as she framed them, are the politicians and other industries coming to terms with the fact that “the BID funds are by lodging, for lodging.” The alarm, she argued, is overdone: “All the freaking out is really unwarranted. Of course we are going to promote wine, restaurants, attractions and everything else that fills our rooms and vacation rentals. It is only the how that is changing, not the what.”

What the fight obscures, Dym wrote, is that most lodging on both sides of the hill has chosen to stay under that one tourism umbrella for 20 years — “We’re kind of the Rolling Stones of the BID world!” — while a wine improvement district, she noted, “imploded” after a short run. The 2026-27 marketing plan “is more focused and strategic than any past plan,” she wrote, will serve inland lodging better than earlier ones and still send visitors to the coast, where most of the room tax is generated. “That’s a win-win by any measure.”

Schneider, for his part, disputes that the businesses paying the assessment want it split. “There is no support from any lodging to give any monies to any other organization than VMC,” he said. A letter to the supervisors signed by 28 inland lodging properties — 18 in Ukiah, nine in Willits and one in Laytonville — asks the county to execute the contract as written and send every assessment dollar to Visit Mendocino County.

“Redirecting assessment revenues to organizations or purposes not reflected in the approved Annual Report would undermine the governance process relied upon by the lodging industry and diminish the confidence that assessed businesses have placed in the BID program,” it reads.Schneider, who provided a copy to the Voice, says the signers represent more than 90 percent of inland lodging. The letter itself claims no percentage, and it had not yet appeared in the board’s public file as of Tuesday morning.

Kessen says her committee includes lodging owners. At least one innkeeper has put her name on the other side of Schneider’s claim — and hers is not among the 28 on the new letter. Jan Rodriguez, who owns the Baechtel Creek Inn in Willits and spent two decades on the county lodging association and Visit Mendocino County boards, wrote the supervisors on June 23 to say she strongly supports the inland council and its fund. The 25 percent ask “doesn’t strike me as unreasonable,” she wrote. “Visit Mendocino now says they are willing to do this — however, after years of being on the boards and seeing the attention always go to the coast, I no longer have confidence in this promise.”

In the years since she left, she wrote, nobody from the commission had called to ask how her inn was doing: “I was only hounded about raising the BID!” Her letter asks for one more thing — that the county put some of its room-tax money back into tourism marketing.

The innkeeper who wants a plan before he pays double

Behind all of this sits the 2 percent question, and Jeff Stanford is squarely in the middle of it. With his wife Joan he has run the 41-room Stanford Inn in Mendocino since the 1980s, one of the largest properties still locally owned. That means his signature moves the dollar-weighted petition math more than most.

He’s not signing. “Not voting for it, and they need to have a plan,” he told the Voice — “a well-articulated plan of exactly what they’re gonna do and how effective it’s going to be.”

He didn’t say the assessment is too high, and he didn’t say Visit Mendocino County should go. “I don’t have a problem with 2 percent, but it’s gotta be smart,” he said. “This all needs to be renegotiated.” Stanford has been at this since the county’s first destination plan in the late 1980s, which he pushed for. His complaint is the one Kessen makes from the other side of the hill: show me the plan.

He backs up the new numbers from memory. When he was involved and figures still circulated freely, he says, “83 percent was from the coast anyway.” As for the inland council asking for a quarter of the pot — one of the coast’s biggest payers had never heard of it. “Didn’t know about it until you sent me that email,” he said.

Stanford’s skepticism lands on an organization already spending down its savings. Visit Mendocino County’s audited financials show it spent more than it took in for three straight years: about $600,000 over in fiscal year 2022-23, $400,000 in 2023-24 and $316,000 in 2024-25. It covered the gap from reserves while collections flattened. That’s the context for the 2 percent push: the 1 percent, set in 2006, buys less marketing every year.

The Board of Supervisors takes up the tourism contract at its meeting Tuesday, July 21, in the board chambers at 501 Low Gap Road, Ukiah.

Nobody in this fight disagrees about the goal. Schneider wants heads in beds countywide. Kessen says the aim is “to build a bridge, not to divide and certainly not to destroy.” Haschak wants something that works for Willits and Laytonville. Stanford wants marketing worthy of the place. Meanwhile the two lines keep printing on every hotel bill in the county — the $20 tax that pays for the county everyone lives in, and the $2 assessment still looking for its next contract.