April 12–Attorney Cory Briggs announced Tuesday that San Diego hoteliers have agreed to settle his lawsuit challenging a tax on hotel guests for tourism marketing, but that appears to be news to the defendant, the Tourism Marketing District.
During a morning news conference called to talk about the settlement, Briggs spent most of the time instead lambasting a City Attorney memo released a day earlier that raised numerous legal issues with a ballot initiative he has authored to boost the hotel tax. The Citizens' Plan, as it is called, is designed to address a variety of civic initiatives, including helping finance an off-the-waterfront convention center facility and paving the way for an expansion of San Diego State on the Qualcomm site in Mission Valley.
Briggs, who represents San Diegans for Open Government, declined to elaborate on the deal, other than to say that it would require the city's Tourism Marketing District to support his initiative that backers expect will qualify for the November ballot.
Hotel owner Bill Evans, who chairs the board of the hotelier-run Tourism Marketing District, issued a statement Tuesday afternoon saying there has been no board vote on a legal settlement. Whether there is some consensus among board members on the framework of an agreement remains unknown.
"We have had and will continue to have productive conversations with SDOG (San Diegans for Open Government) but there has been no action taken by the board," the statement said. "All our efforts are aimed at preserving the TMD and its demonstrated results in generating TOT (transient occupancy tax) for the City of San Diego's General Fund."
——
——
While Briggs says he knows a settlement agreement was approved unanimously by the marketing board on April 4, he has held off announcing anything out of deference to board members, who wanted to first discuss it with Mayor Kevin Faulconer's office later this week.
His plans to delay discussing the settlement changed, he said, with the release Monday of City Attorney Jan Goldsmith's memo. Goldsmith has said he was concerned enough about the legality of the initiative to consider recommending that it not be placed on the ballot.
The Goldsmith memo, Briggs said, "is a calculated maneuver to ensure the public is disenfranchised. Whether we get a TMD settlement that's announced by the TMD after they meet with the mayor on Friday, I don't control that. I can tell you we had an agreement, it was confirmed back to me by more than one person involved in that. But it does appear that the timing of this memo raises questions."
The tourism board, which already has spent more than $2 million fighting the lawsuit, so far has been unsuccessful in getting a judge to dismiss the litigation.
Briggs acknowledged that the primary reason for Tuesday's news conference was to respond to Goldsmith's memo, which identifies six separate problems with the measure, including that it would give hoteliers improper control of city tax money. It also would violate state initiative law by addressing more than one central issue.
The Citizens' Plan calls for an increase in the hotel tax from 12.5 percent to 15.5 percent and would allow hotel operators to hold up to 2 percent of a guest's room rate for tourism marketing and another 2 percent for a convention center campus.
Like the Tourism Marketing District, Goldsmith said Tuesday he is unaware of any legal settlement.
"The city has asked for a copy of Mr. Briggs' settlement proposal that includes all the terms, but has not received one," Goldsmith said in a statement. "We were provided only with an agenda of topics for a meeting that is still three days away. Even after today's news conference by Mr. Briggs, his purported settlement terms remain a mystery to the city."
If Briggs were to secure a settlement binding the Tourism Marketing Board to endorse his initiative, that support could potentially put the Chargers initiative for financing a $1.8 billion hybrid stadium and convention center at a disadvantage. The lodging industry has yet to weigh in on the measure and some hoteliers have expressed reservations about the size of the hotel tax hike.
The Briggs initiative is, in some key respects, at odds with the Chargers' measure, which would raise the hotel tax to 16.5 percent. While some of those increased hotel tax revenues would help fund a stadium, Briggs' Citizens' Plan bars public funding for a downtown football facility.
The Chargers are on track to begin collecting signatures on April 23 to qualify their measure for the November ballot and have no plans to retreat, Chargers adviser Fred Maas said Tuesday.
"We, unequivocally, are not backing away from our initiative. Period," he said. "We respect whatever decisions are made by the (Citizens' Plan) coalition and believe we can coexist."
lori.weisberg@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-2251 Twitter: @loriweisberg
