Old Town visits rise while sales tax dipped slightly in 2024, city staff reports

City staff presented completed 2024 data and preliminary 2025 foot‑traffic figures for Old Town Scottsdale, reporting continued growth in visits since 2018 while noting a small decline in inflation‑adjusted sales tax receipts for 2024 compared with 2023.

Will Brooks, management associate to the city manager, told the commission the analysis uses two principal data sources: mobile‑device‑based visit data from Placer and sales tax receipts from the Arizona Department of Revenue. Brooks clarified that the report counts “visits” as a single visit to a location within a 24‑hour period and not unique visitors, and that Placer updated its visitor‑home calculations and the city updated district boundaries for this analysis.

Brooks said Old Town visits rose about 5% over the six years from 2018 through 2024 and that visits for many months in 2024 exceeded 2023 levels. By contrast, inflation‑adjusted sales tax revenue for Old Town was slightly lower in 2024 than in 2023 (a decrease Brooks quantified as roughly 2–2.5%), a divergence he attributed in part to inflation and to the limits of aggregated data. He reported that the city’s analysis shows that, averaged across districts, each additional visit correlates with roughly $1.38 in sales tax revenue for the city.

Looking at early 2025 data, Brooks said first‑quarter 2025 visits were about 400,000 above the same period in 2024 and that year‑to‑date visits through May 2025 were roughly 5–6% higher than the comparable period in 2024. Placer breakdowns for Jan–May 2025 showed out‑of‑market visits up 1.6%, employee visits up 1.7% and resident visits up 4.3% compared with the same interval in 2024.

Brooks answered commissioner questions about whether free public events could explain the gap between rising visits and lower tax receipts; he said the aggregated dataset cannot attribute spending at a per‑event level and recommended a deeper district‑level analysis to link specific events to sales tax performance. Commissioners were satisfied with the presentation and asked staff whether the commission wanted additional analytical items; staff said they would accept direction from the commission for further analysis and continue to report quarterly updates.

Separately, staff reported bed‑tax collections through April of about $32.2 million—roughly 93% of estimated annual collections of $34.6 million—and industry reporting through April that showed modest declines in occupancy and average daily rate in the local market, items staff said would be included in future quarterly reports.